Indie

January 31, 2012

Here's the big "duh" comment of the month: I purchased almost no new-to-me albums this month, but for the two that I did, I feel much more connected to them than a lot of other recent acquisitions—as evidenced by the handful of blog posts I did around each. Even when I got hungry for something new, I just wound up going back to one of these or even older albums. (I like both of these records, though I feel like I'll be returning to Slave Ambient a lot more in the future.)

The War on Drugs: Slave AmbientA confident band that has their sound down so perfectly, so effortlessly, that I almost question whether or not they're pushing themselves hard enough. Great record. [Review.]

Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for My HaloWhen Vile picks up the pace even a little bit, he reaches something that I find really compelling. I like this record but I've found that with repeated listens the downer tracks start to drag. [More thoughts.]

January 17, 2012

Prior to hearing Smoke Ring for My Halo in full, the two Kurt Vile songs I came across via numerous blogs were “In My Time” and “Jesus Freaks.” Perhaps not coincidentally, these are the two most upbeat tracks on the album, and the two most focused. The majority of the rest of Smoke Ring depicts Vile as a smart but apathetic songwriter. Writing for Coke Machine Glow, Christopher Alexander said “Kurt Vile’s music sounds like it was made entirely from bed on Sunday mornings,” which I think is a pretty vivid portrayal of the mood of this record.

I picked up Smoke Ring for My Halo three or four weeks ago now, but put off spending a lot of time with it because I got the War on Drugs’ Slave Ambient at the same time; since the two records share a certain degree of aesthetic similarities, I wanted to take them in one at a time and not confuse or bias my ears. Vile is a former member of the War on Drugs, a fact that is coincidental to my getting both records at the same time. That band’s singer, Adam Granduciel, has certain similarities to Vile—they both follow in a vocal lineage that descends from Bob Dylan and passes through Bruce Springsteen, among others. The War on Drugs have a bigger sound (chalk it up to being a full band and not a solo artist?), but there is still an element of numbness in both artists’ music.

A better contemporary comparison for Vile might be Cass McCombs. Many of Vile's songs are repetitive, a little strange, and morose, not unlike McCombs' pitch-dark songs (McCombs would win a competition for those descriptors, however). All of these songwriters, each in their own way, proffer a kind of detachment in their songs.

Is this a full-blown trend among contemporary (male) songwriters? Dylan's delivery by way of a Gen X slacker attitude, filtered through a 21st century glaze? (And it does seem to be a guy thing; some of the best or most renowned female songwriters of recent note—St. Vincent, Feist, Sharon Van Etten—are all writing much more direct, powerful, often virtuosic material. It's a flip from the past clichés of the tortured man and the forlorn girl.)

Vile, McCombs, and Granduciel are all part of a traditional songwriters' lineage. It's easy to hear varying degrees of Dylan, Cohen, Springsteen, (early) R.E.M., and (early) Elliott Smith, among others, in their songs. But the new wrinkle for this group of contemporary songwriters is that they seem to reflexively put the listener at arm's length—obscuring songs through production techniques, drowsy vocals, obtuse (post-Stipe?) lyrics. We've moved past the protests of the 60s (Dylan, Ochs), the blown-up drama of the 70s (John, Joel), the middle-class solidarity of the 80s (Springsteen, Mellencamp), the disillusionment and personal struggles of the 90s (Cobain, Smith), into the Age of Terror and information overload of the new century, where a popular response to The Way We Live Now is introversion, or at best an avoidance of speaking for anyone but oneself. There are few, if any, bold statements through song anymore. (Alternatively, you could call this a subset of a larger trend in [indie?] music that goes beyond guy-with-guitar songwriters and also includes a great deal of shoegaze-influenced atmosphere-rock of the last few years.)

Which is not to say there is necessarily some essential thing missing from Vile and McCombs' songs. (It's worth noting that McCombs, Vile, and the War on Drugs all made songs that appeared on my list of favorite tracks of 2011; McCombs' "County Line" is probably among my top three favorites, though I didn't care much for the rest of the album from which it came.) McCombs and Vile are both smart, literate songwriters, even if their songs rarely reveal true passion—that is, some kind of emotion or sense of urgency that, borrowing from Alexander's line above, would require them to get out of bed. That seems to be intentional on their part: it's not that they lack passion, but rather that the suppression of passion is part of their MO. Take Vile's "Society is My Friend," at the center of Smoke Ring—also the song that most reminded me of McCombs and kicked off this whole train of thought. Like a lot of McCombs' songs, it is long, repetitive, and filled with vivid if strange imagery ("Society is my friend / he makes me lie down in a cool bloodbath"). Vile tells of how his "friend" took his woman from him—"He stole my old lady, saying... kiss me with your mouth without closing it all that much." Society is an entity that is beautiful and dangerous and impossible to fight:

Society is all around Aw, hear the beautiful sound Of all the high-pitched squeals Ecstatic brilliance at its finest That's my friend Society is all around It takes me down

Over five and a half minutes Vile oozes his lyrics amid a swirl of music that nearly consumes him. He's not fighting something, he's allowing it happen around him. Life can be hard, think I'll stay in bed.

January 16, 2012

There are a lot of reasons to like the Dirty Three—the evocative mood their songs call up, the grandeur of their crescendos, Warren Ellis's rustic and beautiful violin. I like them for all those reasons too; those are the things I enjoy about the trio when I'm not thinking too hard on it, just letting their songs fill the air around me.

I like them for a different reason when I take the time to concentrate on their music. And that reason is Mick Turner. Turner is an unassuming player and most definitely not the member of the Dirty Three who is in the spotlight. But train your ears on his playing and you'll hear a style that describes few others.

Their latest track, "Rising Below," from the forthcoming Toward the Low Sun, is a good example. It hardly features Turner, but that's why it's such a good illustration of Turner's role in the group. It's easy to be taken with Ellis's overlapping violin lines or Jim White's shuffling, spirited drumming. But underneath it all is Turner. The sound of the group is all the more unique for Turner's taking on a role that might otherwise be held by a bassist, establishing a bridge between the drummer and the soloist and giving them both something to latch onto. Unlike a bass player locking into a drummer's kick, though, Turner's fragile, erratic playing mirrors White's skittering snare.

More wonderous to me are the actual notes Turner sprinkles out. He plays as if his fingers refuse to actually stay on the fretboard for more than a second at a time. He doesn't strum or pick his strings so much as let stray notes spill out of his guitar. The order in which the sounds come out of his guitar seems incidental but not accidental. Every note fits, no matter how he places them.

January 13, 2012

Isn't it nice to have a new Shins song in the world? They've been gone so long I think they may have even lost the sting of being an indie rock punchline (they never deserved it). That is, he, not they. James Mercer is the only original member left. If there was any question as to how the drastic lineup change would affect the group's sound, "Simple Song" answers with a resounding "not really." The only real difference I can discern is in the drumming—Janet Weiss, who sits in for this track, is a more forceful player than Jesse Sandoval, and production-wise her drums simply sound better.

But those are minor differences, really. This is a Shins song, just like all the others. Mercer is a consistently compelling songwriter, which is a positive way of saying he is predictable. He falls into a similar category as Rufus Wainwright, Bjork, and Britt Daniel of Spoon, among many others: his menu of rhythms and melodies is limited, but something about the quality of his voice and the effortlessness of his playing keeps that from mattering. "Simple Song" is like a Frankenstein's monster of past Shins songs: the melody of the chorus is an echo of the chorus from "Gone for Good" (itself a peppier, higher octave mold of the melody from the bridge to "Young Pilgrims"), and the girl-group rhythm was done before on "Turn on Me" and "Phantom Limb."

Here's the thing though: to say Mercer has done it before is not (necessarily) to say he's done it better. Or worse! Is it possible to find someone who has never heard the Shins before and do a Pepsi Challenge? It's just as likely that they'd say "Simple Song" is their favorite as "Turn on Me" or "Gone for Good." And why not? It's a similar song, but it's great song. Actually, it's a terrific song.

January 10, 2012

It's easy to hear some immediate surface similarties between War on Drugs singer Adam Granduciel's voice and that of Tom Petty or Bob Dylan, but for me that resonance has since evolved into a weird personal nostalgia for Dire Straits. My dad loved Dire Straits, and especially Brothers in Arms, so this is a welcome reference point for me (as opposed to, say, all the Steely Danisms happening elsewhere in the indie scene). Anyway, it's not just a personal thing. I mean, really, they're not that far away from the next "Walk of Life," are they?

January 09, 2012

Every instrument in the War on Drugs’ music has its assignment, no matter the song. (Though, interestingly, no member of the band is resigned to a specific instrument.) The drums are metronomic—no frills, no fills. The keyboards drone. The “No Rain”-inspired lead guitar solos and solos and solos. Despite (or because of) their rigidly defined roles, none of these elements are at the forefront of Slave Ambient. Rather, it's the rootsy presence of leader Adam Granduciel, whose Americana attitude meshes with the lite psyche of the rest of the band way more seamlessly than it has any right to. This whole record is pure chocolate and peanut butter—too down home to be Talk Talk, too monochromatic to be Wilco.

The whole record is equal parts familiar and inspired. In this age of washed out indie-ambient acts, it’s a wonder that the band is able to balance the two elements of its sound so deftly. Granduciel’s voice is high in the mix, not doused in (too much) reverb; his words are intelligible, his personality is anything but effaced. I’m reminded more of Tom Petty or Mark Knopfler than Kevin Shields or Panda Bear. (That I find this refreshing is, I think, an indictment of rock music in 2011/12.)

No, seriously, enough with all the comparisons to other bands. Slave Ambient is a good record. I was unmoved by it on the first few listens but have nevertheless been induced to return to it over and over. It's a repetitive listen—the rhythms are steady within the space of each track, there are few choruses, no breakdowns. The songs become part of a larger tapestry; the dynamics are found not from verse to verse but song to song.

The reckoning point of the album comes at the middle. This is where you know whether or not you’re on board with the War on Drugs or not. It starts with the locomotive “Your Love is Calling My Name,” which melts into the languid instrumental “The Animator” and then ascends to the almost-anthemic “Come to the City,” finally ending with the brief comedown of “Come for It.” The string of songs boosts Slave Ambient to another plane. I hesitate to say it’s epic—so much about this record is level, not grand; numb, not raw—but it belies a sense of purpose to these songs. Granduciel is not just enshrouding himself in mood and calling it art. He’s making music.

January 05, 2012

By now you've made your way through all the end-of-year lists you can stomach, I'm sure. But wait! There's more: my favorite songs of 2011. I've made a mix of my 24 favorite tracks, excluding anything from my favorite albums of the year because it's a given that those albums each contain multiple favorites. The tracks below are not ranked, but are ordered for an ideal two-hour mix. (And for what it's worth, I don't think a lot of these tracks showed up on others' lists, so hopefully a lot of this will be new to you.) Click play on the first track to listen in sequence—or download all the songs and listen to them however you want. [Part I] [Part II]

December 28, 2011

I found a lot of great music this month, more than I can (or wish to) fit on this playlist. I purposefully ignored everything I featured in this post, also all discovered this month and highly recommended (and ps, some of these songs come from the same sources).

December 27, 2011

Aside from the first two albums on this list, December was, for the most part, spent catching up on other people's end-of-year lists in hopes of finding that perfect record that slipped past me in the last twelve months. I found a lot of great songs (some here, some to be listed tomorrow, some to be listed in my final EOY roundup of favorite 2011 songs, soon), and was compelled to pick up a handful of full-lengths for further investigation. Here's what I came back with, in the order I acquired them this month. I can't say, yet, whether I think any of these late-breaking additions to my listening year deserve a spot on my favorites of the year list—everything is still a little too fresh for me to decide—but at any rate there is some good stuff here.

Julia Holter: TragedyMy friend Cameron might have summed this record up best on twitter: "approaches my fantasy Laurie Anderson/Sunn 0))) collabo, but retains a whiff of the collegiate." Tragedy is, for the most part, a unique and wonderful album, drifting between moody atmospheres and a larger, carefully considered structure—often in the space of one track (actual track divisions on the record are best ignored, in favor of a front-to-back listening experience). There is a mythological concept underlying the record, if you wish to pay close enough attention to the words when Holter's voice comes in. Personally I prefer not to—I like the record more for its sonic journey than for its literary aspirations. Tragedy has a lot to offer, not least of which is the hint of great potential. Holter has another album slated for 2012, and judging by the first available track, she is only getting better.

The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This WorldLeyland Kirby's release under the Caretaker moniker is possibly the subtlest album I've ever heard. That should be taken as a backhanded compliment, because there are times—lots of them, actually—where I wonder if the pleasure I find in this record has anything to do with Kirby at all. For this project Kirby loops extended passages from jazz 78s from the 1920s, and he emphasizes the crackles, pops, warps, and hisses of the records themselves. It's extreme nuance—and it's interesting!—but I'm fooling myself if I think the best parts of the tracks are because of Kirby. Rather, it's his source material. Which leads me to wonder if I wouldn't get just as much pleasure out of playing old, crackling jazz 78s. I like this record, but I don't know whether or not I like for the reasons Kirby intends. (n.b.: I've been advised to check out of some Kirby's releases under his own name, also from this year, which I've not gotten the chance to do yet.)

Nicolas Jaar: Space is Only NoiseOf all the minimalist electronica I've been listening to this month, Jaar's album is certainly the most fun. It's low, bassy, relaxed, stoned, and occassionally silly. But don't let that come off as a knock. Compared to Holter and Kirby's serious-minded albums, Jaar's record might actually be packed with more ideas.

December 24, 2011

Imagine: it's 3 am on New Year's Eve, and a drunk Rod Stewart is in a closed-down bar but refuses to leave the stage. He's vibing on "Auld Lang Syne" and nursing a heartache. Wait, no: it's the Walkmen.

December 20, 2011

There are lots—lots—of end-of-year lists out there right now. I've sifted through so many lists for so many years that the very prospect of ingesting them all has become too tedious to bear. That said, there are a handful that I find to be pretty dependable every year, and that always yield at least a couple of finds for me. I've spent some time cycling through the tens (hundreds) of songs/albums on the lists below and have come away with something worthwhile from all of them. (Related, a couple of weeks ago I did a post of my favorite overall blogs of the last year—some overlap here, for obvious reasons. Also related: I listed my favorite albums of the year already, and my favorite "blind spot" discoveries; I'll do a favorite songs mix too, but probably closer to the new year.) This rundown, by the by, is sorted in the order I encountered the lists.

Why I like it:Say what you want about Altered Zones, but it had a strong aesthetic point of view that wasn’t bogged down in discussions of Odd Future, Lana del Ray, or Destroyer. All the better since it was a group blog and not just one person’s taste. I didn’t love everything on the blog (nor on this list), but I found lots of gems—namely and especially Julia Holter, whose album I promptly downloaded after hearing "Goddess Eyes."

Why I like it: Dave knows what he likes—mostly reverby indie and girl-fronted folk, with a few outliers—and he searches hard for it (The Beyonce #1 is one of maybe five mainstream tunes, fwiw). I like it too, though I admit I have a lower tolerance for too much of it, which is why I think I like to look for his song recommendations more than his album recommendations (though I look for those too). 76 songs is a lot to wade through, and I admit that about half of it didn’t really faze me, but there are some treasures in here.

Why I like it: All the things I said about Rawkblog could be said about The Decibel Tolls, too—it’s just different genres of music. Kenny Bloggins goes for old and new psychedelic, veering from the garagey end of that spectrum over to the more atmospheric and spectral. Bonus points on this list for including ten excellent reissues. This is probably my favorite overall list, for a good mix of consistency and breadth and its ratio of known to new-to-me material. (Also: I've seen Slave Ambient show up on a few lists, and I've even listened to it once or twice to get a vibe for it; but seeing it at #1 here made me go out and get it for real, in hopes of unlocking it.)

Why I like it: This is, for the most part, a very indie-centric list, but the meat of the list feels less on-trend than the blurred-out sounds of Pitchfork or, say, the twee-er sounds of Rawkblog’s mix. There’s something a little more Americana about PHW’s list that appeals—plus the left-field pick of Arrange, who I've never heard of but who turns in a Hood-like mix of ambient, electronic, and sad-sack bedroom indie.

I'm sure a few more worthwhile lists will come before year's end—Coke Machine Glow's has begun, and I usually find some good stuff via Swan Fungus, who hasn't revealed a list yet. Any other lists I've missed that you found especially rewarding? Let me know in the comments.

December 06, 2011

When I was compiling my rundown of favorites for the year, making some attempt at a ranked list, a curious thing happened—the list shook out by genre. My three favorite albums of the year were all song-based albums—and, incidentally, by artists I was already familiar with. However, I probably listened to #4–6 as often as #1–3, if not more: these are the ambient records, which I tend to put on while I'm writing and/or working and/or looking for something to sink into, sonically. Finally, the psych rockers pulled up last—Disappears and Moon Duo. I fell a little harder into this genre in 2011, picking up an older Wooden Shjips album too and occasionally checking out a few other acts, old and new, who traffic in the repetitive, muscular rock (even a docile creature like me needs a little testosterone every once in a while). These albums, too, were good soundtracks to writing—just indecipherable enough to function like instrumental music, with a requisite amount of push to keep me engaged with writing and editing projects, or keeping me psyched up for working out/playing tennis.

That I'm inclined to split my favorites up like this—not only by genre but by the life tasks they most often soundtracked—says something about me as much as it says something about the year in music. What I heard of it, anyway. As much as I like all of these albums, none of them transcended themselves. None of them ran away with my heart. Or, they didn't run that far. That most of these albums are by artists I was already familiar with must mean something too: I tried looking for new artists, new sounds, and for the most part came up empty in 2011. I felt out of step with a lot of trends this year—call it nostalgia or chillwave or soft rock or PBR&B (doesn't matter if those are all different things). Outside of some of the nü-kosmiche ambient stuff, a lot of "new" sounds just didn't resonate with me in 2011. Too, the more tried and true genres, like good ol' fashioned indie rock or more straightforward songwriters, felt limp this year. Artists I've loved—My Morning Jacket, Okkervil River, Fleet Foxes, Iron & Wine—all put out albums that were just okay. Artists that were new to me—Real Estate, Smith Westerns, Tennis, Wild Beasts, Unknown Mortal Orchestra—ranged from so-so to not bad (fwiw, UMO was the best of the bunch; I hold out hope for whenever they mature to the next level).

Of course maybe I didn't look hard enough; that's on me. And I take it to heart that it's on me.

In a lot of ways I feel I've been in a fog in 2011, and I'm pretty sure it's not entirely due to listening to krautrock and ambient. Lives change: you get busy, you work hard, you crave silence or television, you want to spend time with your family and not on a computer or plugged into an iPod. You get stressed about money. You want to exercise more. You want to spend a lot of time with your kid and you want your kid to chill out, too. You want to go on dates with your wife more often than you can actually afford to. You want to drink a little more, stay up a little later, sleep in past seven (or six, or five), but all of those things have become risky propositions. You want to read the paper in one sitting in the morning—not via your iPhone in bed at night. You want to know what's going on in the world by outlets other than your twitter stream. You want to stop feeling so busy, but you also don't want to admit that you waste a lot of your time. You want all of that, and you want a few other things too—so it's no wonder searching out music on the internet starts to feel... not without pleasure—not at all! But difficult, and easy to give up on.

This list of albums is a contrast (and a complement) to what I dubbed my son's top songs of the year. Those songs—not typical kids songs but oldies, classic country, and generally happy, often deliriously goofy songs—also made up a big part of my listening year. Those were the "family songs." They played around the house, on road trips, etc. Those are rightfully and wonderfully going to be the soundtrack to my memories of this period of my life, when my son was a toddler and I worked in a museum and our house was small and my wife was home and I occasionally ghost wrote blog entries for a professional organizer and the weather was always great. Maybe Tim Hecker and Disappears will soundtrack those memories too, in a different way. Maybe. Maybe I'll forget I'd ever heard those records.

Doesn't matter. All of these albums were my albums in 2011. Outside of Feist's Metals and Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer, my wife was not especially into any of these albums (if she heard them at all). I listened to them on my own time—while walking to work, or in my office, or driving to the tennis courts, or when I was home alone, or in a coffeeshop doing a freelance job. It's hard, lately, to have something that feels totally, 100%, like it's mine. The circle you're able to draw around yourself gets smaller as you get older, have a kid, get a promotion, etc. That's not a complaint—it just means the things that are yours become more precious. With that perspective I look at this list and, on one hand, wish that I liked all of these albums even more—that they fazed me the way, say, albums by Andrew Bird or Animal Collective or Fleet Foxes or Midlake did in past years. And on the other hand I feel a closeness to all of these records. They are pools I can swim into, blankets I can wrap myself up in, hands I can hold, friends I can sing with.

2011 has been a funny year. In some ways it's been one of the happiest of my life, and in others I feel like I sleepwalked through the whole thing. If that's true, then what does this best-of-11 list mean? What are these songs, what were these albums? This:

I walked to work with Moon Duo's Mazes in my headphones. I crossed busy intersections and passed a hospital and stopped at a Starbucks where I occasionally bought a sausage sandwich despite knowing that I should choose anything that is even slightly healthier.

I pushed through while listening to Disappears' Guider (and, for that matter, Lux, their 2010 debut). Pushed through tedious freelance projects, pushed through long days in my windowless office. I felt a connection to an older version of myself—the one who blasted the Jesus Lizard in his dorm room and screamed into a microphone in an warehouse in an industrial park in downtown Phoenix in the summer with no AC while 15 sweltering kids, two of whom had Romulan haircuts because that was a thing, nodded their heads.

I wrote and wrote and wrote to Rene Hell's The Terminal Symphony, an album that I can rarely remember after it's over but I continually feel compelled to return to.

I recognized in Mountains' Air Museum that I'm a sucker for the current trend in ambient music that apes the sweet 70s synths of Cluster and Harmonia, et al., and that I'm okay with that.

I buried myself in Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972. Sometimes that felt perfect, and sometimes I hated that I felt the need to bury myself in anything.

I felt happy listening to Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer—an album that I wasn't expecting would make me happy. She became sort of like a friend who could take it if I called her stupid—2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-0-0-0-0-0-0-1-0—because she and I both suspected, really, that she might be a genius.

I reconnected with Low, via C'mon, as if they were a brother or sister I hadn't talked to in ten years. Love and regret welled up inside of me as I realized that they had been perfect during all those years I'd been away from them (I bought Trust, The Great Destroyer, and Drums & Guns this year, too). I became cognizant of how much I had missed them, and how much I loved them. Truly, loved them! I imagined that they were feeling the same way about me on the other side of their record, wherever they were.

I felt bittersweet listening to Feist's Metals—by far, by the way, her best album. I felt touched by her words, uplifted by her music. I felt like the year, musically speaking, had redeemed itself when an artist I knew I loved was able to do better than everything she'd done before. I felt rejuvinated by her achievement. I felt sad because so much of this record is about losing something; it made me think about all the things I have to lose. I felt happy because I haven't lost anything. I felt thankful.

When we were out last week for my birthday, "The Circle Married the Line" was playing in the car and my brilliant wife said it might be her favorite song on the record. I told her I really liked it too, though lyrically it didn't make any sense to me. She said she thought the image in the chorus was really beautiful, really simple. I didn't understand—I must not have thought enough about it, because in my mind (really!), I just thought about geometry (or sex). I hadn't considered that I might be right or wrong about it—I just liked the song. She said, "It's the sunset—the sun marries the horizon. It's such a lovely way to put it."

It was. It was beautiful. We were in a parking garage in Hollywood at midnight, and it was beautiful. I saw the sun dip into the ocean and I let out a long breath. I turned on the car and we drove home. The first day of the new year had begun.

November 10, 2011

After a dry summer, my acquisitive streak seems to have returned, both for old and new records. Here's a rundown, in the order I picked things up.

Motion Sickness of Time Travel: Luminaries & SyntastryThis has been a fantastic year for the ambient/nü-kosmiche genre—I count albums by Tim Hecker, Rene Hell, and Mountains all among my favorites of 2011 so far. That means the bar is pretty high for the genre right now. Which is bad news for Motion Sickness of Time Travel (aka Rachel Evans). I find Luminaries & Synatry to be a fine record—good for writing or reading and the like—but it rarely grips me as a work of art, as the best of the year often do.

Roedelius: Durch die Wüste and Selbsportrait IHearing the Roedelius Schneider track last month reminded me that my journey through the old Harmonia/Cluster universe is far from over. Among other albums long on my to-buy list have been some of Roedelius' early solo albums. Through some degree of happenstance, these are the two I picked up. (Did I miss a better option? Please advise!) Durch die Wüste, his first solo release, starts with an unexpected (and not terrific) rock vamp before the rest of the record settles into the more identifiable relaxed synths-and-piano compositions. Between the two albums I picked up, I prefer Selbsportrait I, his third solo album and first in his acclaimed Selbsportrait series. It feels a little closer to the sounds of Cluster, though with fewer beats. (Actually, it reminds me more of Raymond Scott than Cluster—which is sort of what Cluster would sound like if they didn't have any beats. So, go figure.)

Joe Byrd & The Field Hippies: The American Metaphysical CircusAfter a track by the United States of America came up on shuffle earlier this month, I went on a "whatever happened to" Google search and ran across this, USA leader Joe Byrd's return following the original band's break up. It's clearly meant as a sequel of sorts, given that the album title is identical to the opening track on the USA's one and only album. No other USA members appear among the dozen or so Field Hippies, a cast of L.A.-based musicians and singers, but Byrd is clearly going for the same sound—an eclectic mix of psychedliea and avant electronics, with equal doses humor and haze. Unfortunately the album just comes off as second rate. As similar as it is, it just falls flat compared to USA's spark. It's not a bad album, but it's just okay—and a disappointment compared to Byrd's earlier masterpiece.

October 19, 2011

When I think of artists who have been the soundtrack to the last decade of my life—a pretty significant decade filled with marriage, dues-paying, success, death, and birth—Feist is one of the first who comes to mind. Both Let It Die and The Reminder latched onto me and wouldn't let go, seeing me through my share of highs and lows.

That’s not to say I found either album to be perfect. In fact, both are patchy efforts to my ears, each containing highs so high that I eventually forgive the lows. By now I’ve listened to both so many times that the songs that originally bothered me are now beloved like family (second cousins, maybe, rather than brothers or sisters, but family). When Feist's songs hit me—“Mushaboom,” “Let It Die,” “So Sorry,” “1234,” and so on—they hit me hard. They feel like perfection. They’re perfectly sweet, perfectly buoyant, perfectly regretful, perfectly yearning. Yet just as often her songs don’t nail my bull’s eye. Their softness nags at me, their sultriness irks me; they set off irony alarms inside of me that I’m never truly certain they intend to set off. For an artist I profess to love, Feist sure does make me wrestle with her music, and with myself. How someone whose specialty seems to be making comfortable music can make me feel so uncomfortable, is a conundrum. But here’s the thing: Feist’s albums are worth wrestling with.

But let's not dwell on past records. Metals, Feist’s newest, is her best. It’s one of those deceptively wonderful albums that doesn’t really announce itself on first listen, yet over time sinks its hooks into you. On first listen I felt like a lot of the songs bled into each other, aside from a few noticeable spikes like the climax of “Graveyard.” I couldn’t fully pay attention to the record and lost track of how long I’d been listening to it. I kept thinking “this must be the last song,” and then another song would come on and I’d think it again. I didn’t hear anything as immediate as “1234” or “I Feel It All” or “My Moon My Man.” That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just meant that Metals wasn't easy to latch onto.

Then I listened to it a few more times and developed a more measured response: Metals is Feist’s most cohesive album, consistently good from front to back. Another way of saying that, I thought, was that the lows were higher but the highs were lower. Fewer homeruns but fewer strikeouts, too.

Then I listened to it again, and again, and again. And now I feel fully immersed in Metals, in sync (I think) with what Feist is trying to accomplish with the record. One thing she’s not trying to do is repeat the lightning-in-a-bottle success of her The Reminder. (Could she, even if she tried?) Metals is a pure, beginning-to-end listening experience, its peaks and valleys drawing on each other for their impact. It’s not a casual collection of songs like Let It Die or a patchwork of different, sometimes conflicting moods as on The Reminder. Metals is moody without being dark, by turns beautifully intimate and passionately boisterous.

There’s a certain kind of song that Feist has always been good at writing: the simple, hushed numbers like “Gatekeeper” or “So Sorry.” That kind of song is here too, in the form of “How Come You Never Go There” or “Cicadas and Gulls.” But she’s found a new way to contrast those tracks; instead of the upbeat pop numbers of The Reminder or the soft-rockisms of Let It Die, she’s invited a troupe of backup singers to boost her aches and yearnings to new heights. “The Bad in Each Other,” “Graveyard,” “A Commotion,” “The Circle Married the Line,” “Bittersweet Melodies,” “Undiscovered First,” “Comfort Me”—all feature a phalanx of voices, a heavily emphasized rhythm section, and/or a buoying string section to amplify her songs without overpowering them. Over the course of a dozen tracks, Feist manages to color Metals with a variety of tones and emotions without ever deviating from the overarching mood of the record. This is something she’s never managed before. Metals is by far her most mature, most assured effort.

October 10, 2011

The new Mates of State album is exactly what you'd expect it to be—sugar-high indie pop powered by Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel's constant harmonies and all-earworms-all-the-time melodies. Much like the New Pornographers (though a little more emo), they make their craft seem so easy it might be mistaken for uninspired and boring.

It's most definitely not boring—every song, just like on their other records, begs to be sung along or danced to. Nevertheless I stress "just like on their other records." Again like the New Pornos (and a ton of other bands, to be fair), the question for you is whether or not you need more of the same in your life. Some do, some don't.

Based on only a few listens so far, I can tell what kind of record Mountaintops will be for me: I'll rate nearly every song four stars (read: no classics, no duds), will listen to it for a week or two, and then it will bleed into the fabric of my iTunes library for the rest of my life. Its songs will pop up on shuffle in all the appropriate smart playlists, or when I'm in the mood I'll put all my Mates of State albums on random. In any case Mountaintops will soon cease to function as a discrete collection of ten songs.

Don't get me wrong: that's not a bad fate for an album. There's lots of outcomes for albums' long-term consumption in the iTunes age. I could delete them all together (hello/goodbye Gayngs and Mi Ami), I could keep them in my sprawling library but never find my way back to them (long time no see Wolf Parade and Wye Oak), or I could cling to the record as most artists hope their works are clung to (it's like you never left, Andrew Bird and Radio Dept.). Mountaintops, and the Mates of State in general, falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and so do a lot of albums by consistently solid and pleasurable bands (please make room, Pernice Brothers, Kings of Convenience, and Beach House).

October 05, 2011

Putting together these monthly mixes has become one of my favorite things to do on Pretty Goes with Pretty. It's not like putting together a typical mix, which usually has some unifying theme. No, these are mixes made with strict rules:

all the songs were downloaded within the last month

all are new to me, and it should go without saying that I think they're all great

the mix is intended to be listened to straight through and should be a satisfying experience

(The fourth, til-now-unspoken rule is that each month's mix must also flow from last month's mix, because I keep a single mega-playlist of the year's mixes on my iTunes)

This sounds simple but in many months can be quite challenging. First, I'm letting my tastes dictate what must be included in the mix—whether it's country, soul, ambient, indie, whatever. Then I need to figure out how to make that all run in a way that seems natural. This month was probably the most challenging all year. I must have listened to these ten songs in varying orders for the last two weeks, before finally settling on this one tonight. It's probably not my most elegant mix, but I do like some of the weird juxtapositions, especially hearing the sound of the keyboard in Roedelius Schneider's "Single Boogie" echoed by the sound of the Equals' guitars).

Anyway, have at it: press play on song #1 and just let the rest go. Hope you enjoy. If you want to hear the other mixes I've done this year, click here and scroll through the various "Favorite Downloads" mixes.

October 03, 2011

So continues my summer of not really listening to very much new music. I think I've actually reached the point where I prefer it.

Moon Duo: MazesI've become a bigger Wooden Shjips fan this year, picking up Dos a few months ago and listening to that pretty regularly ever since. I was getting psyched for their new album, West, to come out, but then got distracted by Moon Duo, a sjide project. A few voices on the internet were claiming that Mazes, released earlier this year, was better than West. So I got this instead. You never really know what to expect with side projects, but in this case you're basically getting a Wooden Shjips record. It's the same repetitive psych, totally on par with all the other WS stuff I've heard thus far. I'm still keen on West and will probably pick it up before the year is over. I can foresee hitting my quota with this band/sound sooner or later, but for now I'm still eating it up.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: s/tI ran across a couple of Unknown Mortal Orchestra tracks last month and put "Thought Ballune" on my mix of favorite downloads for August. That song has continued to burrow its way into my head to become one of my favorite new songs of the year so far. The rest of their new album is right in line with that track. And I say that as a for-better-or-worse statement. Unknown Mortal Orchestra's production aesthetic is some strong stuff: the experience of the record is almost like tuning in to some far-off, static-addled radio station playing vaguely identifiable cuts from the 60s, 70s, or maybe even 90s (or, heck, maybe they're just Ween fans?). The retro songcraft filtered through the mangling distortion makes all of the songs here feel well-worn and perfectly on trend at the same time (again, for better or worse). I like all of this record, though by the end the aesthetic starts to take away from the songs themselves. For a debut this is fine—the sound is fresh, compared to many of their 80s-plagued peers. I'd hope that by their next album, the songs truly rise above the sound.

September 07, 2011

Thanks to StanM at ILM for giving me a heads up to this: an hour-long set from Low. Sounds great, well shot, and they open with my favorite song from C'mon (fyi, arguably my favorite album of the year so far). The rest of the set is almost entirely from their last three albums:

Nothing But HeartNightingaleYou See EverythingMonkeySilver RiderEspecially MeSunflowerTry To SleepCanadaViolent PastLast Snowstorm of the YearMurderer

August 01, 2011

July didn't see a huge haul of new-to-me music, but I certainly felt more connected to what I was listening to this month than I did last month. Here's the rundown, in chronological order of their acquisition.

Loscil: SubmersLoscil is an act that found its way onto my radar toward the end of last year, and I've been randomly downloading tracks from various blogs as they've come across my RSS feed. After adding a track to last month's favorite downloads mix, I decided it was time to get a full album. Based on a few different people's recommendations I went with 2002's Submers, and it hasn't disappointed.

Eleanor Friedberger: Last SummerOne of my favorite albums of the year so far. Aside from Low's C'mon, and some ambient records which sort of fall into a different category in my mind, I think this is the only 2011 album I've felt compelled to return to over and over again for the simple pleasure of listening to it from beginning to end. In other words, I'm able to shut off the critical part of my brain—something that is often hard for me to do, if I'm being honest. More thoughts on the record here.

Wooden Shjips: DosLike Loscil, this is a group I've liked for a long time via random mp3 downloads but I've never heard a full-length all the way through. In anticipation of their new album, West, I decided it was time to delve a little deeper into their catalogue. I chose Dos somewhat at random but I'm under the impression it doesn't really matter where you start with this band. Their formula is easy to grasp: heavy, repetitive psych jams. Dos is only five songs long, though two of them pass the ten minute mark. And frankly if you ask me there ought to be a law that says no song by this group is allowed to end before the seven minute mark. The longer the band goes on, the more impressive their songs become.

Little Scream: The Golden RecordAt the beginning of the month Dave Rawkblog put up his mix of favorite songs of the year so far, which included Little Scream's (aka Laurel Sprengelmeyer) "The Heron and the Fox" (among others, some to be featured in a mix I'll post tomorrow). This song has fazed me hard. I think I've listened to it at least once every day since downloading it. It's so simple and modest—refreshing for its lack of ornament. I'd almost forgotten that it was possible to create a song this perfect without adding layers of reverb and synths or other affectations. If anything it underlines how lacking in actual tunes so many other current bands are. That's not to say that the rest of The Golden Record lives up to that standard. For better or worse it is a more varied affair—a little atmosphere here, a rocker there, and some stripped-down beauties in between. It's a fine album with plenty of nice songs, but through no fault of its own I just can't get beyond the perfection of that one song. I wish and hope and pray that her next album can hone in on her strengths, because it feels like a breath of fresh air amid all the mostly awful trends happening in contemporary music right now. Who knew that quiet, unadorned songwriting would be a niche that needed filling? And yet it does.

July 28, 2011

What should one expect from a solo album by one of the Friedberger siblings (aka the Fiery Furnaces)? They are a band that is rarely predictable and often walks a tightrope between being totally irritating and utterly compelling. And strangely enough, when they opt to play it more or less straight, the results are not always great—take their last album, the piano-based and mostly inert I'm Going Away, for example. The group is so prolific and seems to take so much glee in flummoxing its fans in one way or another that I no longer approach their releases with any expectations whatsoever—it's just as possible that it will be brilliant as it will be stupid. Happily, Eleanor Friedberger's solo debut is brilliant—one of my favorite new albums of the year so far. Hovering around 40 minutes and made up of ten unique earworms, Last Summer retains all of the vocal and lyrical quirks Friedberger displays in her full-time gig as it luxuriates in straightforward song structures. Even the saxophones in "My Mistakes" and "Owl's Head Park" don't bother me—an exception to the rule in this year of the saxophone's indie rock invasion.

There's something about Friedberger's persona that is endlessly fascinating, despite sometimes feeling repetitive. As a singer she doesn't have a terribly broad range, and two-thirds of the time she is actually doing more of a staccato monologue than singing. Her lyrics rhyme as often as they don't; she seems to be reading straight out of a journal—half diary entries, half stabs at short stories. I've started to regard her as the Christopher Walken of rock and roll—just give her the script, remove all the punctuation marks, and let her speak the words in her own strange and rhythmic cadence, which seems to adhere to rules of orating that the rest of us are not privy to. If I showed you the lyrics to one of the verses of "The Inn of the Seventh Ray," could you intuitively tell me where she's breaking the lines?

If Highland Park isn't close enough there's that place on the way to the Inn of the Seventh Ray. Take a lecture in stereoscopics to show us the way to see with one eye open and one eye closed. You keep one eye open and one eye closed on the rest of the 1, I don't think so.

The words barely even make a lick of sense printed on the page, but somehow Friedberger evokes the images just right—the song seems to be about old friends reuniting as they try to find their way from East Los Angeles to a restaurant in Topanga Canyon (about an hour's drive, for the record). Some of the lyrics she tosses in are poetic at best, nonsensical at worst ("Climb upand down to the car in the commercial that pays for us to eat at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, but since the handle is broken, I can't get out," she sings later), but it hardly seems to matter when Friedberger sings/speaks them in her carefully plotted style.

This is clearly the key element to Friedberger that one must lock into in order to enjoy her music; if ever I hear a criticism of her singing style (including with the Fiery Furnaces), it is that she is "overly mannered" in her delivery. Yeah, she is—so what? The joy of her songs, aside from the way their melodies seem to burrow into your head even when she's not fully singing, is in listening to her lyrics. If you tune out the words and only listen to the vocal, she can start seem more of a one-note singer. That's partly why only one song on album, "Glitter Gold Year," falls flat for me. That page of Friedberger's journal seems only to have had a couple of lines scratched out on them, and she's committed to stretching them out over almost three minutes, hence the repetition of "2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-0-0-0-0-0-1-0." Compared to the nine other tracks on the album, this is the one time it sounds like Friedberger is passing time, waiting for inspiration to hit.

Of course, in true Fiery Furnaces fashion, that's also the song that worms its way into my brain more than any of the others. Say what you want about either of the Friedbergers, but they certainly know how make hooks—whether you like the feeling of those hooks in your brain is another question. As far as Last Summer goes, they're sinking in deeper and deeper with every listen and that's just how I want it.

July 05, 2011

Despite last month's paltry mix and last week's confession re my lack of listening, I've somehow managed to come up with eight new-to-me tracks in the last month, crafted into a tidy mix for your listening pleasure. In truth this collection came more or less from just three sources: apologies/props to my friends at the Cargo Culte, from whom I pilfer many tracks every month (this month, Steve Moore and Harald Grosskopf); shout-out to Swan Fungus, whose top ten of the year so far clued me in to the Tape track; and a special nod to Miles at The Notes for his mix of favorites of the year so far, which yielded the opening and closing ambient tracks, the PJ Harvey (which technically I heard before but I didn't hear it) and the Dirty Beaches ditty (though its best quality, as my brillant wife pointed out, is the Francios Hardy track it samples); the Bjork track, I saw in about forty-two different places.

June 30, 2011

On the spur of the moment I threw down this list on my tumblr earlier today, so I thought I'd re-post here, since I have the freedom to make a little mini-mix for you (re-ordered for better flow).

It’s a short list (with the caveat that I heard a lot of albums that were good, but you all want something better than good, right?):

Low: C’mon

Mountains: Air Museum

Rene Hell: The Terminal Symphony

Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972

A good indicator of where my head is at, since all the rock/songwriter records I’ve heard fall into that “good” category, seemingly incapable of rising to the next echelon. I guess this means if all you chillwave acts would just drop the vocals altogether and maybe turn the synths up in the mix, I’ll like your records more.

As the rest of 2011 wears on and we go through the glut of fall releases and the scrambling to hear everything possibly missed before making our year-end proclamations, I’m sure this list will morph. I can tell you this: C’mon will still be at or very near the top of the list. It’s beautiful.

Yeah, this is it. I acquired all of one album in the last month: Sondre Lerche's newest, self-titled album, which I wrote about the other day. The long and short of it was, like a number of 2011 records I've heard lately, it's a fine album but it's not addicting. In fact I haven't really heard anything addicting in a long, long time. Is it me?

Music got away from me this month. I blinked and June was over. I was too busy working my tail off at the office, chasing after my kid, watching tennis, and in my spare alone time watching The Killing in a few marathon sessions. I think it's a combination of that dreary show and my lack of serious music listening that makes me feel like June was a kind of a lost month. A mildly depressing month.

I'm tempted to say I'm in a listening slump, but that implies that I've been trying to listen to music but failing. Until just a couple of days ago, that really hasn't been the case. Frankly I just haven't had time for music. That sounds like a really strange, wrong-headed thing to say! But the fact is that my listening time has been severely curtailed of late, and when I have put on music—during my walk to work, for instance—it's been an aimless shuffle of recent acquisitions and a bunch of ambient tracks, coincidentally all that happens to be loaded on my iPhone. (Is it possible that my current funk is related to the fact that my iPod has reached capacity and, since I can't put anything new on it, I don't use it?)

At any rate I find myself in a mood. I feel frustrated with music. Or, rather, with the music I'm managing to hear. I feel like most of the channels I've previously relied upon to point me to new music have been leading me astray lately; and though I wish it weren't the case, the truth is that I don't dig through the proverbial slush pile the way I used to. I'm looking for the next epiphany, not sure when or where I'll find it.

June 26, 2011

Sondre Lerche is an artist who I followed early on—I loved his first two albums, appreciated The Duper Sessions, and have not really kept up with since then. At my brilliant wife's urging we decided to check in and see how he sounds these days. The answer is, not all that different from how he sounded in the early aughts. That's fine with me, though this album only sticks with me here and there. I really like the first two tracks, especially the opener, "Ricochet." It starts quietly, highlighting Lerche's jazz-influenced penchant for melody, then is lifted by a soft rhythm section before escalating again by the final third. If nothing else it proves how adept Lerche is at constructing a song. That doesn't mean, however, that the blood flows through every single song here.

While Lerche's craftsmanship rarely wanes, much of this record lacks the special ingredient—call it heart—that compells repeated listening. Things start to get patchy with the third and fourth tracks—and, as my brilliant wife said, "if you can't get it right in the first four tracks, you're dead to me." It picks up again with "Coliseum Town," which features a lovely, not-overpowering string arrangement, but after that I feel lost. After repeated listens in the last ten days or so, I still couldn't hum you a melody from the second half the record. Nothing rubs me wrong, but the songs just fade into the background: there's Lerche's distinctive voice, doing a variation on the "Sondre Lerche Melody"TM. No surprises. Not a bad record, but no surprises.

June 09, 2011

Every month after I do my album rundown, I like to put together a mix of all my favorite random new-to-me downloads. Well, I guess I didn't spend much time surfing the blogs in May because it turns out I barely downloaded anything all month. So, here you go—four whole songs! (And a note re the Eleanor Friedberger song: what can I say? The chorus sucked me in too deep, I couldn't reject the song once the sax came in. I guess it's the exception to the rule.)

June 08, 2011

May got away from me in terms of writing for this blog, unfortunately. Too bad because I acquired a lot of albums I'd meant to write more about. Well, here's the rundown of everything I acquired this month, in the order I got it. In short: this was a month where a lot of past favorites put out new albums, most of which were pretty good but few of which surpassed previous efforts.

Klaus Schulze: DunePrior to this month I only had one other Schulze album, his first, Irrlicht. It's an extremely dense bit of drone, with three 20-30 minute tracks. For my next dalliance with Schulze I thought I'd skip ahead ten albums to Dune. Though there are more electronic elements here (and a little spoken word on the second track), it's still of a piece with that early material. I like most of it but it's not something I'm going to spin regularly. (Actually, my favorite track here is the bonus track that came with the reissue, "Le Mans"—it's a little more active, relatively speaking.)

Okkervil River: I Am Very FarI had a long period of severe infatuation with Okkervil River a couple of years ago, more or less coinciding with the release of The Stage Names and The Stand Ins. And though I still love those records (and, to a lesser degree, Black Sheep Boy), I also feel myself at or near the stage of having enough Okkervil River. I Am Very Far is a consistently good album that doesn't detract from my love of the last two albums, nor does it build on that love much. Will Sheff is still singing in that moany way that verges on too much if you're not paying attention to his excellent lyrics. Following on the trend of the last two albums, he and the band are upping the ratio of rockers to ballads—a good thing, though sometimes the production takes away from the clarity of the many instruments piled onto each track. I Am Very Far can often seem like a blur—an angsty, rockin', pretty good blur.

Fleet Foxes: Helplessness BluesI'm an unabashed, unapologetic fan of Fleet Foxes' debut. I was thinking the other day about how it's been a really long time since a new record has really bowled me over from front to back—one of those albums where every song becomes my favorite song over the course of months and months of repeat listens. Fleet Foxes was one of those records for me. That's a lot to live up to. Helplessness Blues is not that kind of album; it's a good record—listen up! it's a good record!—but merely being good in the shadow of an excellent record can't help but feel like a disappointment. A mild disappointment, but a disappointment nonetheless. I've listened to it a lot since buying it and there's little that I outright dislike about it. It's just not EXCELLENT.

My Morning Jacket: CircuitalThis is, thank God, a positive rebound from the often embarassing Evil Urges, though Circuital is not without its flaws. As on every My Morning Jacket album, there is at least one track that stands among the best they've ever done (even Evil Urges had "Smokin' from Shootin'"). Here it's the title track, an epic seven-minute opus that feels all the more epic in context since it follows the constantly building album opener, "Victory Dance." By "The Day is Coming" you've already been riding high on Circuital for almost a quarter of an hour, and the album sustains that level for a while longer before dropping into the weak middle third—the kinda dumb "Outta My System," the especially awful "Holding onto Black Metal," the generic "First Light." It picks up again for the final portion of the record, going out on a surprisingly subdued note with the back-to-back ballads "Slow Slow Tune" and "Movin' Away." Ending Circuital on a melancholy note is refreshing for this band, but that's about the only thing on the album that is. Maybe by album #6 and year #12, My Morning Jacket doesn't need to reinvent themselves. Circuital is a satisfying album, even if there are a few others in their catalogue (Z and Tennessee Fire, for starters) that are superior.

Wild Beasts: SmotherI was not previously familiar with Wild Beasts but I picked up Smother, their third and newest album, on the recommendation of a few people on twitter. I've been playing it pretty consistently since buying it but, aside from the terrific opening track, it's not sinking its teeth into me. The whole album is good but keeps fading into a vague background music regardless of whatever activity I'm going while listening.

Talk Talk: Laughing StockI made a comment on twitter that Wild Beasts reminded me of the Antlers, to which Matthew Perpetua responded "I can't imagine what Wild Beasts must sound like to you." Once I got past my immediate impression, I realize that I was responding to the hints of Talk Talk on Smother—a band I think the Antlers are also influenced by if in slightly different ways. As I thought about this, I nudged myself into getting Laughing Stock, an album I've been meaning to get for a while now, ever since being bowled over by Spirit of Eden. God, what a beautiful pair of albums these are. They're not terribly dissimilar from each other—I think I might like Spirit of Eden just a hair more, perhaps because I heard it first—but Laughing Stock is among my favorite acquisitions of the year so far.

Mountains: Air MuseumI've been looking forward to a new Mountains album for a long time now, and I'm glad to say that Air Museum does not disappoint. It does surprise, however—a hard thing to do for an ambient record! Mountains' last album, Choral, was a glacially pased guitar-oriented album, not too far off from, say, Stars of the Lid. Air Museum, while still working in the same genre, is about 180 degrees from Choral. It's mostly synth-based, and the tones bubble and pulse at a (relatively speaking, mind you) quicker pace. In general the album feels more akin to the new breed of kosmiche acts that have been popping up in recent years that have tickled my ears—Arp, Emeralds, Rene Hell, etc. I'd accuse the duo of trend-hopping if I wasn't so enamoured of this trend.

Peter Bjorn & John: Gimme SomeAfter the let-downs of the last PB&J album and Peter Moren's solo album, I was ready to let Gimme Some pass by. At the urging of my brilliant wife I picked it up, and lo and behold, it's pretty good! While it's not as effortlessly perfect as Writer's Block, there's still a sense that the trio isn't taking themselves too seriously here. The whole first half is fun and effervescent; it dips slightly in the second half, where the songs veer into more guitar-centric rockers, but it recovers again by the last few songs, including the album closer "I Know You Don't Love Me," one of Gimme Some's highlights.

May 11, 2011

Before sitting down to write about Wit's End, an album I don't much like, I went back to read what I wrote about Cass McCombs' last album, Catacombs—an album I like quite a lot. There I wrote that its opener, "Dreams Come True Girl," is slightly alien to the songs that follow in that it's a more sophisticatedly assembled song than the others. In some way Wit's End's opener, "County Line," is also alien to the rest of its album. Not because it's got an inventive structure like "Dreams Come True Girl" but because of its feel—"Country Line" is warm, it aches. It's one of the best songs McCombs has ever written. It's a contrast to the rest of the album, which feels numb and turgid.

the rest of the album feels more of a piece, as Cass McCombs approaches the remaining ten songs in a similar fashion. The music is simple—each song built on just a few chords and sparse arrangements, their length determined more by the story McCombs wants to tell than by a typical verse-chorus-bridge pop structure. "Prima Donna," for instance, is built around a simple two-chord progression and is all verses, colored only by a little trumpet vamp toward the end. "Don't Vote" feels much longer than its five and a half minutes, whereas "The Executioner's Song" seems to pass right by because your mind and ears have by now become so inured to McCombs's clinically depressed Big Bird vocal style and dank, echoey production.

That description could work pretty well for Wit's End, too. Each of the eight songs are minimally arranged and last anywhere from four to nine minutes, McCombs clearly enamored of his verses at the expense of a decent chorus or, often, a worthwhile melody. The difference between Wit's End and Catacombs, however, is that Catacombs takes a turn at the midpoint and becomes, for McCombs at least, a much more lively album. There is a rhythm section, there's a change in pacing. In short, there's variety. Wit's End has almost none of those elements. A song that is built around its lyrics and lopes along as long as the narrative requires is not de facto a bad thing (see: most of Leonard Cohen's oeuvre), but the deadly dull pace of Wit's End's forty-seven minutes saps the record of its elegance.

May 06, 2011

Unlike previous months most of my random downloads this month were older songs (and country, too). But there were a few 2011 tracks that snuck into my craw—My Morning Jacket's newest, which has me excited for their album coming out in a few weeks, and Matthew Cooper's "Expectation," a lovely ambient track. This mix is thus a little strange but is nevertheless meant to be listened to in order. Enjoy.

May 05, 2011

A little bit late, but here's a quick rundown of every new-to-me album I picked up in April, in the order I acquired them.

Low: Drums and GunsContinuing the rehabilitation of my opinion of Low's output of the last ten years, I've come to the realization that, in fact, the band has never made a bad album. My bad for ever assuming that they had. Unfortunately when Drums and Guns originally came out the only songs I heard from it were "Pretty People," "Breaker," and "Hatchet"; I didn't particularly like the first and third of those tracks, and the video for the second kinda annoyed me. Since I'd already (mistakenly!) written them off after The Great Destroyer, it was easy to pass this over. Forgive me for my errors! Though it's not my favorite album by Low, it's still quite good, and it stands apart from the rest of their output for its anger and dread. It's final third in particular is really magical.

Rene Hell: The Terminal SymphonyHell is another entrant in the quickly filling "nu-kosmiche" genre of Krautrock-influenced synth/ambient (see also Oneohtrixpoint Never, Emeralds, and Arp, among others). The Terminal Symphony is Hell's second full length and is quite good. Like Arp's The Soft Wave (my favorite album of last year), it does a good job of mixing textures, melodies, and dynamics, making something that is easy to get lost in but providing enough hooks to climb your way out.

Cluster: ZuckerzeitHarmonia: Musik von HarmoniaSpeaking of, here are the two biggest culprits inspiring the wave of acts like Rene Hell et al. I own and love other albums by both of these groups (well, technically it's the same group in both cases—Harmonia is just Cluster+Michael Rother), and have been meaning to get these albums for at least a year. After watching the excellent BBC documentary about Krautrock, I was inspired to download both posthaste. I've been listening to both ever since, often one after the other, to the point that I don't totally know where one ends and the other begins. They're both excellent.

Caetano Veloso & Gal Costa: DomingoI had no idea this record even existed until I happened across a link to it earlier this month. Apparently the album was made prior to either Veloso or Costa's solo debuts; it's basically a samba record not too far off from the sound of, say, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina's Tom & Elis (one of my favorite records of all time). This isn't as good as that, but then again that's a pretty high bar. This is still quite nice.

Low: C'monI promise everything I said about Low above is true, but nevertheless—like I said yesterday—C'mon is their best album in ten years, and is so far in the running for my favorite album of the year.

May 04, 2011

2007's Drums and Guns was certainly the most tortured album in Low's seventeen-year discography. After watching the documentary made around that time, You May Need a Murderer, I'd frankly be worried for the band if five years later Low were still pushing to the outer waters. Drums and Guns was more than mere artistic statement—it was a difficult snapshot of a man who was trying to hang on. The documentary portrays Alan Sparhawk as someone who is deeply troubled by personal demons as well as the ills of the world. War, economic downturn, and psychologic ills aside, Sparhawk was literally ready for the rapture to begin. He was on the other side of a nervous breakdown and was clearly still wrestling with himself—all while his wife and two children joined him in the van on the road to the next stop on tour. It's a dark and difficult documentary to watch, especially for fans who have spent nearly twenty years holding on both to the music and to the idea(l) that Low are more than a band, they're a family. No one wants Low to suffer.

Listening to C'mon, the newest album, I'd rather not say it's a retreat from where Low were going on their last album, sonically speaking, but rather a return to a healthier form. (I hope, at least; I've nothing to go on but the sound of the music).

Retreat, return… on the other hand I hate to use either word. It's either to Low's eternal credit or eternal detriment that, to some ears, they'll always more or less sound the same, while to others each album represents a dramatic progression or regression in their sound. Though it's true that Drums and Guns is their angriest record, and before that The Great Destroyer was their loudest, those are still relative terms. For all their differences, neither are immeasurable steps away from the simmering restraint of Trust, the experimentation of Songs for a Dead Pilot, or the dynamism of Secret Name (which includes some of Low's sunniest and darkest material). Few bands, now or ever, have been as consistently brilliant as Low for as long a period of time. So let's not get caught up in talking about similarities and differences, but rather measure the overall quality: C'mon is a gorgeous and near-perfect album, easily their best since Things We Lost in the Fire, released a decade ago.

C'mon is bookended by "Try to Sleep" and "Something's Turning Over," both terrific additions to the pantheon of Low's poppier, peppier material (think "Starfire," "Venus," "Dinosaur Act," etc.). Together they contain the mood of the record, keeping C'mon hopeful even amid darker tracks like "$20," which hearkens back to the band's Vernon Yard era, where songs possessed the minimum of words and song structure. It and the slow-building "Magic/Majesty" are like true old-school slowcore songs, throwbacks to a time when that subgenre had more traction.

Not to say they've abandoned the sound of some of their more recent material. Sparhawk's distortion pedal still makes its share of appearances, as on the cheekily sinister "Witches." Lyrically the song seems to point to some of the themes of You May Need a Murderer—delusions, rapture—but made light. When the narrator of the song tells his father that there are witches in his room, his father gives him a baseball bat to beat the hags into submission. The whole song is about being quote-unquote tough, but it's those quotation marks that reveal its weakness.

That's where Mimi Parker comes in: she is the strength of this album, and I mean that in every positive sense of the word. (Fitting, perhaps, that it's her silhouette on the album's cover.) As on every Low album Parker's presence is the anchor to each song, though she only sings lead here and there. In some ways that's where the sometimes great but inconsistent Drums and Guns faltered. Aside from one song at its midpoint, that album feels very much dominated by Sparhawk and his demons. C'mon, by contrast, is more tempered. Parker makes her presence known by the second track, "You See Everything," and again a few tracks later on "Especially Me"—perhaps the best Parker-sung track in ten years. There is a motherly quality to her voice; she is reassuring no matter the content of the lyrics or the ominous quality of the music. Her voice is the foundation of the band's sound—the rock. When Low get dark, her voice is a light. Though it was not absent from Drums and Guns, it felt suppressed. Here, even when she isn't singing lead, she retains a softness that counters Sparhawk's fragility.

This is perhaps best exemplified on the album's climax, the eight-minute powerhouse that is "Nothing But Heart." The song starts slow as Sparhawk sings a short verse followed by the line "I'm nothing but heart" repeated over and over. Those last four words could have come straight from Sparhawk's mouth in that documentary: the guy, at what looked to be just above his lowest point, was nothing if not raw and confessional and putting it all out there in his songs. "I'm nothing but heart"—full of emotion and easy to break. Sparhawk latches onto that line like a terrier and never lets go of it as the song builds and builds and builds—it's a lighters-in-the-air anthem like they've never done before. But it's not the dynamic build to crescendo or the electrifying guitar solo that knocks this song up to the next level—it's Parker's soothing voice, which comes in around the six minute mark singing her own set of lyrics in counter to Sparhawk's. Her words are slightly unintelligible amid the din—light in a fog, perhaps—but snatches here and there seem to respond to Sparhawk. Though I can't make it all out, one line sticks out at me: "as we stumble to the shore, as we walk into the night." It's that we that gets me. It seems almost to be a corrective to the masterful "Done," from earlier in the album. In that song Sparhawk sings "I'm weary and stumbling in the desert heat"; later he sings "If you see my love, tell her I'm done." When Parker comes in at the record's climactic moment, singing of stumbling together, not alone, you get the feeling that she's not done. It's as if she is the one holding out her hand, saying c'mon.

April 10, 2011

7:00 am: Driving to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl flea market, we listen to our favorite radio show, Chuck Cecil's The Swingin' Years—a show that has been on the air in one place or another for the last fifty-five years. Anyone who lives in L.A. and isn't listening to this show every Saturday and Sunday morning (on 88.1), you're missing out.

9:30 am: Driving home. I put on Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam. We make it two songs before agreeing that it's too harsh for our moods right now, so we pull out Clinging to a Scheme again—an album that has become a go-to for long drives and other forms of downtime. We're home by track 7 or so.

11:00 am: Once again listening to all the country music I downloaded in the last week. I'm slowly rating every song and condensing the playlist down to my very favorites, which while eventually be part of a bigger playlist on the blog toward the end of the month.

1:30 pm: Hanging at the house with family, I put on the Top Rated playlist and treat it like a radio. Here's what it played:

4:50 pm: My wife leaves to go attend a reading. I'm pointed via Twitter to the bandcamp page for a person/group/entity called Pye Corner Audio, who have a new album called Black Mill Tapes vol. 2. At first I think it's some old, obscure thing—a peer of Raymond Scott or some such—that's been newly unearthed; but the more the record goes on the more apparent it is that this is something made in 2011. Not that it matters, it's pretty good.

5:55 pm: Via tumblr, someone has provided a link to a 1967 album by Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso, which predates both their solo debuts and is basically a samba record, a la my favorite Elis & Tom. It's pretty great. Coop and I listen to it while he has a little post-bath playtime/wind-down.

6:53 pm: Coop asleep and wife not yet home, I put on Zuckerzeit. While I'm listening I make a new playlist that gathers all the krautrock in my collection that skews electronic. I sort it by year so I can perhaps trace the evolution of the sound. Doing so, however, only underlines what's still missing from my collection (earlier Cluster albums, to start; and post-Autobahn Kraftwerk).

7:45 pm: I'm about to start in on Musik von Harmonia—though I probably shouldn't keep playing these two albums back-to-back; I'll never be able to remember which is which—but when my wife returns I switch it to the Caetano & Gal album, because I know she'll dig it. We listen to it as we make dinner, then settle in for some Amazing Race. Happy Sunday.

April 09, 2011

8:04 am: In the car on the way to hit some balls, Dick Clark's "rewind" Top 40 is on the radio—the week of August 14, 1965. The Ventures' theme to Hawaii 5-0 is #6, followed by #5 Tom Jones' "What's New Pussycat?", #4 Herman's Hermits' "I am Henry the EighthI Am", #3 Gary Lewis and the Playboys' "Save Your Heart for Me", #2 the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction". I arrive to the courts before I hear what #1 is.

11:30 am: Back at home, both my son and my wife are sleeping, so I have a brief moment of time alone, which I spend writing while listening to For the Sake of the Song's Wild Weekend playlist. (Bookmark that blog if you don't already - Ramone's always got great playlists.)

12:00 pm: I try streaming Low's C'mon when it occurs to me that a week has gone by and I still haven't heard it in full. Once again, however, I'm interrupted around track 4 or 5—Coop is awake.

1:28 pm: Driving with wife and boy to Versailles for lunch. B.o.B. on the radio and some other pop songs I don't recognize.

2:33 pm: More pop radio as we drive from Culver City to Venice. I finally get sick of it and ask my brilliant wife to put something on. She chooses the Radio Dept.'s Clinging to a Scheme but we only make it two tracks before we arrive to our destination.

3:15 pm: Standing in line at Intelligentsia on Abbott Kinney, Broken Social Scene's most recent album is on. We hear probably five songs in the time it takes to wait in line, then wait for our coffees to be made. Over the course of the next couple of hours as we browse in various stores we hear Dave Matthews Band, Maroon 5, Fleet Foxes, the Cure, and the Smiths. Possibly other things but if we did they didn't register.

5:00 pm: Driving home, we finish out the Radio Dept. album. Once home I wake up the computer and see the NPR Player still open, so I play Paul Simon's So Beautiful or So What. When it's finished, C'mon starts playing and I finally hear the album in full! Though I'm also giving Coop a bath and reading him stories so I don't totally process what I'm hearing. He's become very insistent about stories. He picks the book he wants to hear, walks over, puts it in my hand, then climbs right into my lap. There's no arguing with him.

7:16 pm: After putting Coop to bed, and while wife is out running an errand, I finish off the NPR trifecta and stream Panda Bear's newest. I still think "Last Night at the Jetty" is one of PB's best songs—it's got three different hook-filled choruses in a row, after all—but overall Tomboy is really monotonous. I've never been hot on the entirety of Person Pitch either, but that album seemed to stretch out in different places. Noah Lennox's multilayered vocals are ever-present on Tomboy. It becomes suffocating after a while.

9:15 pm: Spoon is on Austin City Limits. Man, Spoon. No other band working today has as confident a hold on their sound while at the same time never sacrificing quality songs. They somehow manage to be cutting edge and traditional at the same time. Part of that is because everyone in Spoon is clearly a serious musician—a thinking musician. Song for song they know which instruments, chords, and notes to use, which not to use, which they could use but needn't. It's dazzling to hear and to watch. No band of at least the last five years is as smart or as sophisticated as these guys. Watching them on ACL unintentionally makes me think of Tomboy as total amateur hour. Spoon's restraint and subtlety underscore everything that irritates me about Panda Bear—it's too piled on, all the time. It's as if Noah Lennox identified all of his weaknesses as a singer and a musician and found a way to mask them with sonics; whereas Spoon, if they ever had any weaknesses in the first place, simply removed them, replacing them with air and silence.

April 08, 2011

7:00 am: My morning playlist was determined by all the people I follow on tumblr. Ever since I learned how to press play once to let all the mp3s on my dashboard play, I've been doing this a lot more. So, this is what tumblr was into as of 7:00 am this morning—quite poppy!

Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Kentucky Hills of Tennessee

9:20 am: …which, in my office, segues seamlessly into Musik von Harmonia… which segues seamlessly into Rene Hell. By lunchtime by day picks up so that I once again don't return to any music until I'm home from work in the evening.

6:00 pm: While I'm feeding Cooper dinner I can hear sound whispering out of my computer; I check it out and see that it's set at its lowest possible volume. In fact it never stopped playing after I'd turned on Noble Beast in the morning. Here we are 10 1/2 hours later and we're still squarely in the "A"s. In fact we're still in the "An"s—the last two tracks of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Elis Regina's Elis & Tom. Apparently it took all day to get through a couple more Andrew Bird albums, the Andrews Sisters, almost the entire Animal Collective discography, and the Antlers. I turn the volume up and let Elis & Tom finish out (it's one of my all-time favorites, after all), and it moves on to April March, Paris in April. We get through about two-thirds of the album before turning it off to veg out to some TiVo'd American Idol. That's it for music. We're zoned after a long week with late nights for both of us.

April 07, 2011

8:45 am: On a damp and overcast morning, I put on Rene Hell's The Terminal Symphonyagain, this time on headphones. I give up after a few tracks because it can't compete with the noise of traffic while I wait for the bus. I switch to the "We've All Got Wheels" playlist I mentioned on Monday. I make it through most of the playlist on my commute, which takes about 40 minutes—30 of which are spent standing around waiting for the bus.

9:30 am: In my office, I finish out the playlist and my iPod glides right into the stuff I was listening to the night before—the Sea and Cake (same old same old from them), Gang Gang Dance (not as good as the other song they've released from their new album), Phil Ochs. Then it's a few Merle Haggard songs, so from Monday—though I feel like I'm hearing them for the first time today.

10:08 am: Needing instrumental music so I can focus on an editing project, I return again to Rene Hell. When it's over I switch over to my "Writing" playlist and shuffle through more instrumental tracks by the Dirty Three, Isan, Oval, Papa M, Four Tet, Tied & Tickled Trio, the Books, Arvo Pärt, Belong, and Philip Glass. Eventually I take my headphones out and don't return to any music for the rest of the work day.

6:08 pm: My wife has a quick dinner ready for us—this is like two hours earlier than usual!—since once again she has to work tonight. While we're eating I feel the urge to listen to the two Michael Nesmith songs we have in the library—"Roll with the Flow" and "Some of Shelly's Blues." It's the latter that I was compelled to hear, ever since hearing an inferior version by the Stone Ponys in the "Wheels" playlist in my morning commute. When those two songs are over I skip ahead in the library to Midlake's first album, Bamnan and Silvercork. It's such a great and underrated album—underrated maybe because it lacks the 70s-isms that made so many people love The Trials of Van Occupanther (itself a genius album). This becomes the soundtrack to Coop's bedtime ritual, which is code for "I didn't really pay attention to any of this because I was giving my kid a bath and reading him a story and putting him to sleep."

8:07 pm: After an hour of silence I put on the Amarillo Highway playlist, also from Monday. I realize that I much prefer the Wheels playlist to this one.

9:15 pm: I've had the BBC4 Krautrock documentary from a few years back bookmarked on my browser for months and months, but I never remember to watch it when I'm home alone. Tonight I finally remember and it is awesome (though I watched it on YouTube and the final segment's audio is unfortunately totally bungled). Snippets of Amon Düül II, Popol Vuh, Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!, Faust, Harmonia, and Cluster. It's awesome.

10:28 pm: Cluster's Zuckerzeit followed by the first part of Harmonia's Musik von Harmonia, both downloaded within moments of finishing the doc—and both albums I'd been meaning to get for a while now. I can't actually make it through the whole Harmonia album—dad's gotta go to bed so he's not a zombie in the morning.

April 06, 2011

8:47 am: On the way to work, My Morning Jacket. I've been in a My Morning Jacket mood for a few days. "Golden" had come up on shuffle on Friday and set my mood aright amidst a shitty day, so I've been listening to MMJ on and off ever since. I have a playlist of all my favorite songs by the band so I can avoid trainwrecks like "Highly Suspicious" or the song from Z about kittens on fire. Of their five albums (and two EPs), 45 songs made it to this playlist. On my bus ride to work: "Dondonte," "Just Because I Do," "Look at You," "Picture of You," "Knot Comes Loose." Right toward the end of the bus ride a hip hop video comes on the Transit TV, competing with my iPod. I don't know who the woman in the video is but she wears a lot of wigs.

9:09 am: In my office, the Jacket jams continue while catch up on email and a few small editing projects, through about 10:45 am before I finally get tired of it.

11:45 am: I scroll through my iPod looking for nothing in particular and land on Cass McCombs, Catacombs. I get through about three songs before I'm interrupted. And so begins a tsunami of a day that keeps me running around all afternoon, never to return to the iPod.

7:03 pm: Home from work, put Cooper to bed, said goodnight to my brilliant wife who is off for an evening work shift. I have the night to myself. I settle into the computer and start with catching up on a few blog posts / mp3s I'd bookmarked in the last couple of days:

8:38 pm: When the album is over my iTunes just starts going alphabetically down the list—only I'm inside smart playlist that is comprised only of songs added to the library since the beginning of April, so it plays the Sea and Cake tune again and then goes down a string of songs from the country playlists I'd downloaded on Monday, ending with "Northeast Texas Woman" by Willis Alan Ramsey. The song makes me imagine Cleveland, the character from The Family Guy, fronting a country band.

9:01 pm: I play the Rene Hell album again. When it's over, I play it again.

10:13 pm: I listen to the Willis Alan Ramsey song again to remind myself whether or not I want to include it as an mp3 in this blog post. Once the Cleveland comparison occurs to me, its presence becomes inevitable.

April 05, 2011

7:15 am: Up a little late this morning (happily) thanks to my alarm clock sleeping in. I put on Panda Bear's Tomboy for the breakfast soundtrack, basically picking up where I left off last night. I do some dishes while Coop drinks his milk.

7:38 am: I start the record over because I didn't hear any of it over the dishes.

9:02 am: My brilliant wife drives me to work. KCRW is on, I have no idea what's playing. Two songs in a row by bands that sound like R.E.M.—the second is something from the new Decemberists.

Tuesday is my day of meeting after meeting after meeting. This week that was compounded by a few projects on deadline. Therefore I listened to no music whatsoever during my workday.

5:50 pm: Home from work, I put the Panda Bear on again. Around the time it's over I'm out the door again for a tennis lesson.

8:07 pm: Tennis lesson over, I surf the radio on the drive home. KISS FM is playing pop stuff I've never heard before. Maybe it's Lady Gaga? This is followed by Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T." During one verse the question occurs to me, "where did the term 'tenderoni' come from?" When that's over I switch to another station playing something by Muse. That's the extent of my music listening for the day. It ended with Muse.

You can get a fuller rundown of everything I acquired in January, February, and March, but today I'm just giving you a mix of my favorite new-to-me acquisitions of the year so far.

Disappears: LuxI bought both Disappears albums within a few weeks of each other, so in some ways they both blend together. Despite the wondrousness that is Guider's closer, "Revisiting," it's last year's Lux that is the overall better record. You can't really go wrong with either but Lux is just a bit more satisfying.

The Radio Dept.: Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002–2010I picked a few nits in my review of this collection, but the truth is anything by the Radio Dept. gets played in this household. My brilliant wife or I routinely go to the first Radio Dept. song in our iTunes library, press play, and don't look back for however many hours it lasts. This collection, happily, makes it last even longer. I still recommend just going for the band's full-lengths first, if you haven't already; but this is an excellent addition to the discography.

Radiohead: The King of LimbsI'm having the same reaction to The King of Limbs that I had to In Rainbows—and, well, I guess every Radiohead album. My craving for it has dwindled, but when I do put it on, I really like it.

Harry Belafonte: CalypsoCalypso is clearly the oddest duck of the mix, but in truth it will probably the album I go back to most consistently for years to come. It's really a fun album. It probably wins extra points for being fun to play with my kid.

The Third Eye Foundation: The DarkThe Third Eye Foundation is like the opposite of how I feel about the Radio Dept.: this is not music you just put on whenever and let play. This is some serious shit with an album title not to be taken lightly. I'm not going to play The Dark regularly, but it is an intense experience and a welcome return to form for Matt Elliott, who has been away from his TEF guise for too long. Review.

April 04, 2011

As this morning's post makes clear, I can get pretty anal about tracking what I listen to. Coincidentally, Nick Southall has appealed to anyone who'll participate to spend this week keeping a music diary. So of course I'm in. For this week only, I'm going to get even more detailed about my daily listening habits. If anything, it will show just how skewed my weekly Soundtrack posts are (since they only track albums I listen to from beginning to end). Here's how Monday shaped up:

6:35 am: I'm up when my alarm clock, aka Cooper, says it's time to get up. Knowing that the new Paul Simon, Low, and Panda Bear are all streaming on NPR this week, I head over and choose Simon's So Beautiful or So What to soundtrack breakfast and a little post-meal playing.

8:40 am: Running a little late for work I come out of the shower and hear snippets of Low's C'mon, also streaming from NPR, which my wife put on. I've been looking forward to hearing this and was l looking forward to hearing it in full once I got settled into work. Hearing snippets of a couple tracks feels slightly like I'm spoiling the record.

8:48 am: I'm out the door, iPod on, walking to work: Low, Drums and Guns. I'd already had it in my head that I'd listen to this on my walk, in anticipation of hearing the new one. I arrive to work at track 10, "Your Poison." After ten minutes of getting settled in, I put the headphones back in and finish the last three songs while catching up on email and work twitter in my office. The last three tracks are, after all, the best three tracks.

10:20 am: Low, C'mon, while working. I make it through five songs before being interrupted—I'm getting a new computer at work. Once it's all set up—it takes about 30 minutes—I head back to NPR, plug in my headphones, and start the album over again. Only the sound is blaring out of the computer speakers as if my headphones aren't plugged in. This won't do; my plans for listening to Low and Panda Bear all day are foiled. I go music-less for a bit.

12:10 pm: Over the weekend I'd downloaded a couple of playlists from Singing the Wire, plus a few Merle Haggard tracks from the Adios Lounge. I dumped them all into one playlist and hit play. I make it through Sir Douglas Quintet's "Texas Me," Billy Joe Shaver's "Honky Tonk Heroes," Jerry Jeff Walker's "Sangria Wine," Kris Kristofferson's "From the Bottle to the Bottom," and Ray Wylie Hubbard's "(Up Against the Wall) Redneck Mother" before being interrupted.

2:22 pm: When Tortoise's "The Lithium Stiffs" comes on, I decide to listen to It's All Around You in full. I'm about to segue into Beacons of Ancestorship but I only make it through "High Class Slim Came Floating In" before being interrupted.

4:48 pm: Looking for nothing special while I do some near-the-end-of-day emailing, I set my "Top Rated" playlist to shuffle: The Shins' "Gone for Good," Neil Young's "Birds," Sufjan Stevens' "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" and the Futureheads' "The Return of the Berserker." Interrupted.

5:28 pm: Heading home, this time on the bus instead of walking. I return to my country playlist. "Sangria Wine," "(Up Against the Wall) Redneck Mother" and "Texas Me" all repeat, along with Great Speckled Bird's "Calgary," the Monkees' "Sunny Girlfriend," Merle Haggard's "I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can," and Little Feat's "Willin'."

5:55 pm: I walk in the front door just as Sam Prekop's "So Shy" comes on. My brilliant wife and I start dancing and singing along with Prekop's "Hey / Ba-da-ba-pa," trying to get Cooper to dance too. He didn't dance but it was fun anyway. "So Shy" is the last song on Prekop's self-titled album so the iTunes library flowed right into Who's Your New Professor as we went through the evening routine of detoxing from a long day, giving Coop a bath, and getting him ready for bed. Eventually the iTunes library keeps chugging along: more country with Sammi Smith ("Help Me Make it Through the Night," "Today I Started Loving You Again," "Kentucky"), reggae with Sammy Dread ("Road Block"), and an awful cover of "Louie Louie" by the Sandpipers.

7:25 pm: Back to NPR, I finally put on the new Panda Bear album. But I only make it through two songs before we decide to make dinner instead. The rest of the night carries on without returning to the play button.

March 29, 2011

Here's a mix of my favorite new-to-me mp3s I downloadead from various blogs in the last month. I must say I didn't do so well keeping up with the blogs this month. The Art Garfunkel track came from one of Aquarium Drunkard's L.A. Burnout mixes; the two 1960s Asian girl groups came from the ever-dependable Cargo Culte, and the rest came from miscellaneous corners of the web. For the record this mix is intended to be listened to in order.

Stray thoughts:

I've never sought out an Art Garfunkel record; perhaps I should?

I hear people compare the new Belong record to shoegaze, but surely Flying Saucer Attack is the more appropriate reference point if "Never Came Close" is any indication?

Need to get that Rene Hell full length stat.

I hated Gang Gang Dance way back when they first came around, but I can't stop listening to "Glass Jar."

March 28, 2011

After spending January and February trying really hard to keep up with all the new releases and the surrounding conversation, I apparently rejected that approach in March, with exactly zero 2011 releases acquired this month. It's actually been a nice palate cleanser, for the most part. Here's a recap of what I picked up, in chronological order. Next week I'll have a quarterly roundup highlighting, specifically, my favorite acquisitions (new and old) of the last three months.

Harry Belafonte: CalypsoPossibly my favorite acquisition of the year so far. This is one of those records, like Les Paul & Mary Ford's Best of the Capitol Masters or Doris Day's greatest hits or Sam Cooke's greatest hits, that will likely be in perpetual play around the house. What I possibly like most about it is that it's not as raucous as you might think it is, assuming like me you only know "Day-O" or "Jump in the Line." Most the songs here are quite stripped down and lovely—sometimes heartbreaking.

Crosby, Stills & Nash: s/tAfter years of getting in deep with the Byrds, I figured it was finally time for me to give CSN an honest chance and listen to one of their records all the way through. Well, the opinions I'd previously held based on their hits remains unchanged. For the most part CSN is just too pristine. I am an avowed fan of great harmonies but CSN for whatever reason leaves me cold. They're all harmony, no heart. I do really like "Lady of the Island," though. Other than that, I'm ambivalent to this record.

Fugiya & Miyagi: Lightbulbs"Knickerbocker Glory" was one of my favorite songs of 2008, though I never got around to picking up the album from which it came. Three years later I came across it on a whim and brought it home. "Knickerbocker" kicks things off and frankly the rest of the record, though following the same basic formula, is rarely as good as that song. A few songs get close—"Uh," "Pickpocket," "Pussyfooting"—but for the most part Lightbulbs is a pleasant if not exhilerating lazy disco album for stoners. There are worse things to be than lazy disco for stoners, of course.

Can: Unlimited EditionThis is a b-sides and outtakes collection that spans 1968 to 1975 and includes material from various lineup iterations of the band. It is almost totally worthless. Most of the nineteen tracks are aimless and kinda stupid. Some are fine but not special, and a small number rise to above average.

Low: The Great DestroyerI feel like a fool. Low, can you ever forgive me for writing off The Great Destroyer based on a couple of listening station samples and a stray mp3 all those years ago? I should have had more faith in you, shouldn't have trusted the middling-to-poor reviews. Who were those reviewers, anyway? I didn't know them—not like I knew you. And yet I let six years go by before I listened to The Great Destroyer all the way through. Low, will you take me back? It's is not a perfect album, but it is a fulfilling album. Where it felt disappointing back in 2005, now it feels refreshing. The great strength of Low is that, even within the confines of their overall aesthetic, they always find ways to push their own envelope. Trust didn't push too hard, while The Great Destroyer pushes harder than anything they'd done before. With this album, Low are clearly trying to break their own mold. Whether you want that mold broken or not will dictate how you feel about the record.

Deutsche Wertarbeit: s/tOver at ILM there is a "Krautrock Listening Klub" thread that has supplied me with inumerable new-to-me jams. The thread went dormant a few months ago but was recently revived, starting with Deutsche Wertarbeit's self-titled debut and Earthstar's French Skyline. I've never heard of either of these groups before, despite my love of the genre. Both of these albums are great, the Deutsche Wertarbeit record in particular. It falls on the more electronic side of krautrock—think Cluster or Harmonia—though comes a little late in the game, 1981. A lot of krautrock acts segued from pioneering electronica in the 70s to cheesy new age in the 80s. Deutsche Waterbeit is a good milemarker on that trajectory. The music is clearly indebted to Cluster or Harmonia's—"Deutsher Wald" feels ripped from Deluxe—but it's also made on synthesizers that sound like harbingers of Tangerine Dream's awful mid-80s work. (Confession: I also acquired Tangerine Dream's Le Parc this month but deleted it from my hard drive after two listens. Dreck.) It's a strange pivot point in the evolution of some krautrock bands, where the aesthetic sensibility is still at a high level but the technology is evolving into something that, to these ears at least, is a bit silly. Don't take that comment too much to heart, however: I really like this album. It's one of my favorite acquisitions of the month, especially for the gorgeously sedate closer, "Der Grosse Atem."

Earthstar: French SkylineI've spent less time with this album but it too is pretty great. Interstingly Earthstar is actually an Americna band, from Utica, New York, who were so enamoured with the music happening in Germany at the time that they moved there. Recorded by none other than Klause Schulze, French Skyline was Earthstar's second album, and first to be released on the German label Sky records (home of Cluster, Michael Rother, and others). It's some epic drone with occasional guitar solos. Actually it feels like a precursor to what Emeralds are doing thirty years later.

March 01, 2011

And now a playlist of my favorite random new-to-me tracks I downloaded in the last month. Most are from new releases or yet-to-be-released albums, with a couple classics tossed in for good measure. Shout out to the Cargo Culte for hipping me to three of these tracks (Fugiya & Miyagi, Hawkwind, and Spacemen 3). Also, the Atlas Sound track came from a great mix by Kenny Bloggins at the Decibel Tolls. (I've been remiss on checking out much Atlas Sound due to being only lukewarm on Deerhunter, but "Quick Canal" has me reassessing that omission.) The rest came either from a zillion other blogs or via Altered Zones.

Unlike yesterday's sampling, this playlist was assembled with the intention of working like a playlist, so I encourage you to press play on the first track and let it cycle through. You can hear the January mix here.

February 28, 2011

Herein lies a rundown of all the new-to-me albums acquired in February, listed in the order I heard them. Happily, no disappointments this month!

Low: Trust (2002)I mentioned earlier this month that I'd picked up Trust because I wanted to get back on board with Low, starting with where I left off. I'd heard a few songs from Trust when it first came out and didn't feel moved to get it—my impression was that it was, finally and inevitably, "just another Low album." Hearing it in full all these years later, that feeling is in some ways confirmed and in others repudiated. In fact it doesn't sound just like any of the albums that came before it. Whereas on prior albums they loaded their albums with beautiful songs and just a couple containing a dash of anger—think "Don't Understand" from Secret Name—here they piled on the edgy songs so the ratio is more 50/50. Not to say I don't like Low when they get this way—Songs for a Dead Pilotis among my favorites in their discography—but that's where the confirmation comes. They have done these kinds of songs before, here and there since at least The Curtain Hits the Cast. Thus nothing here feels surprising or fresh. It's not a bad album by any stretch; I'm glad I finally got around to getting it. It's just not the one I'd recommend to new fans. Previously.

Disappears: Guider (2011)I really like Disappears but I also want them to add to their palate. "Revisiting" indicates they can do it—will they? Review (including a youtube of "Revisiting," which is too long a song to include here).

Seefeel: Succour (1995)Until last year, Seefeel was a 90s act that I mostly missed the boat on. I bought Quique, the canonized masterpiece, and then I more or less stopped there. Everything I read said the group never recaptured the glory of that album. Hearing Succour, their followup to Quique, I now feel like a sucker (sucker/succour ha ha). This album is lovely! In fact I think I like it more.

Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)This doesn't happen often, but I feel I have the least to say about the album I might like the most of this bunch. Ravedeath, 1972 is a beautiful and edgy ambient record. It starts with typical instruments—piano, organ, guitar—and subjects them to so much decay that the whole experience is rendered abstract. I really enjoy this album though I feel like I'm still ten or twelve listens away from fully understanding why I enjoy it.

Radiohead: King of Limbs (2011)So Radiohead have turned in an album that does not measure up to its others—an insane level of expectation, even for Radiohead. It's true that The King of Limbs is battling Hail to the Thief for the honor of sixth or seventh best Radiohead album, but that's not the same as saying it's bad. Many other reviews have noted that The King of Limbs feels less like an album and more like two EPs. Radiohead seem to have made this split quite intentionally; the vinyl version of the album is packaged as two 10" discs. From there you can break it down even further—not two halves but four sides, each side a pair of tracks. In other words it seems The King of Limbs is meant to be consumed in small doses, just a couple tracks at a time with a pause in between, long enough to flip sides. Thinking of the album this way helps explain why it doesn't hang together very well as an "album experience," the way so many Radiohead albums do (OK Computer is downright cinematic, for instance). It also illuminates why, given time and repeated listens, it becomes more compelling. The parts are better than the whole.

February 22, 2011

I started to write a post about Radiohead the other day. I swear it had a point, but there was this long-ass preamble that included a lot of dismissive curmudgeonly passive aggressive grandstanding. At one point the post veered into talking about R.E.M. and it got even more insufferable. I killed it. I don't think I've done a post in a long time that has simply been about something that I love, so instead I'm going to talk about the Fleet Foxes. To wit:

I haven't stopped listening to the new Fleet Foxes song, "Helplessness Blues" since it was released a few weeks ago. I tweeted the other day—"saxophone is my kryptonite but harmonies are my yellow sun." As surely as a smooth sax might antagonize me, so too does a great harmony soothe me. It's why I like Low, why I like Midlake's Trials of Van Occupanther, why I like the Byrds and the Beach Boys, why I like the Fleet Foxes.

That's not the be-all end-all, of course. I like the way the song is put together—basically two songs spliced into one. That's sort of a "Fleet Foxes thing," isn't it? They did it a couple times on their debut, too. "Ragged Wood" shifts into a second movement halfway through, and a few of their other songs feature little preludes or codas that are otherwise unrelated.

It's been more months than I count since a new album has come along and really taken hold of all my listening time—the kind of record that compels you to put it on no matter what you're doing, what else you've purchased, whatever your mood. The last Fleet Foxes album did that for me. I'm hoping the next will, too.

In an act of total fanboyism, here are some bonus goodies since you've probably already heard this song, assuming you wanted to in the first place. First: a couple years ago someone in the comments to another post here clued me in on the band's original, pre-Sub Pop EP from 2006, which also happens to be self-titled so it's kinda tough to track down on the internet. Most of it is only okay—whatever your opinion of Robin Pecknold's lyrics, let it be known that his worst lyrics were on this debut. However there was one track that I fell in love with which foretold where they would go with their later material.

February 18, 2011

Disappears appeared last year with their debut, Lux, and have already turned in a followup, Guider. The speed and efficiency with which they operate matches their aesthetic: of the sixteen total songs they've released, fifteen are short and sweet psyche rock attacks. Disappears' music is loud but focused, walking a line between chaos and control like an expert acrobat. "Superstision," the lead track from Guider, gives a good indication of their formula. The tightly wound rhythm section pushes each song forward as the guitars descend like a thundercloud, all distortion and delay and wah-wah and feedback, while the singer shouts curt monotone phrases over top.

Disappears are a bizarro respite from a lot of the other new music I'm hearing lately. They are primal, noisy, edgy—a perfectly rigid line amidst a lot of soft noodles. Not to say they exist in a vacuum; they share a love of acid rock, pigfuck, and krautrock right along with peers like Wooden Shjips, Psychic Paramount, Earthless, and others. Among them all, Disappears remains unique if only for their succinctness.

Not counting the one song in their catalogue that is unlike the rest, that is: Guider's closing track, "Revisiting." It's a monster fifteen-minute vamp that is totally hypnotic and enveloping. The song just keeps going until you almost forget you're listening to it. More than once I've had the experience of being jolted right around the eleven-minute mark, realizing that the train is still chugging along. That moment also happens to coincide with when I realize how awesome it is.

Although all of Guider is great, "Revisiting" is really its saving grace. Up to that point, all of Disappears' songs have been almost militantly interchangeable. As much as I like Lux and Guider, the question inevitably comes up: how much more Disappears does a guy need? "Revisiting" at the very least portends that the band has more tricks up their sleeve.

February 08, 2011

John Vanderslice is one of the most dependably enjoyable songwriters working today, if not always the most distinctive. His vocal range is limited, his melodies don't vary much from song to song, his pacing is usually slow or midtempo. At the same time, his formula usually yields nice results—I could play his songs all day long and not ever get tired of them.

In fact, that's what I did the day I got White Wilderness—loaded it up and put it on repeat. (It was especially easy since the album is a quick thirty-one minutes.) I must have listened to it four or five times in a row. And I have to say it benefitted from that immersive listening, because it mostly failed to make much of a first impression. It was nice but it passed me by, other than a few tracks here and there. Yet as soon as I'd finished listen #2 I had already begun to claim a few tracks as new favorites.

Vanderslice actually shares the billing on White Wilderness; the album is a collaboration with the Magik*Magik Orchestra. And it's the songs that feel the most collaborative that are also, not coincidentally, the best. Whereas tracks like "Sea Salt" or "20k" simply sound like Vanderslice's ballads with strings, songs like "The Piano Lesson" and "Overcoat" clearly show off the orchestra's virtuosity. The songs are busy and surprising and thrilling. They bring a dynamism to the record that doesn't seem like it would be there if Vanderslice were going it alone. These tracks come in the middle of White Wilderness; not only are they the album's highlights, they make some the other songs better by juxtaposition. "After It Ends," stripped down and orchestra-free, practically glows.

Unfortunately the twists and turns that make the middle of the album so engaging aren't sustained over the course of all nine songs. The rest is more typical Vanderslice; I can't say they're bad songs—they're good!—but they feel workmanlike. The end result is that, overall, White Wilderness feels neither disappointing nor essential.

February 07, 2011

I'd intended this as a complement to my albums rundown from last week but was waylaid in getting it together. As I hope to do every month, here is a mix of my favorite individual tracks, old and new, I came across in the last month (or, in this case, going back to mid-December). The majority of these tracks came from a handful of other people's mixes—namely The Decibel Tolls and Swan Fungus, as well the Mindbending Motorway Mix created by Broadcast's Trish Keenan, which went around the internet after news of her untimely passing hit. The last track, which kinda sticks out from the rest of the mix but I think makes a nice ending to the whole thing if you listen to it straight through, came from Rawkblog.

February 02, 2011

A confluence of Low references on various message boards, twitter feeds, blogs, and actual conversations has got me thinking about the band again. After going back and re-reading what I wrote about all their albums and EPs released between 1994 and 2001, I started to feel winsome—the way you feel when you start thinking about someone who used to be your best friend but for some reason, no real reason, you lost touch.

So I've been attempting to get back in touch with the band. I downloaded Trust, which is the first Low album I didn't pay attention to upon release. It's a good album, not deserving of my ignorance. I'd always thought of it as being the first Low album that just kinda sounded like other Low albums, but I realize now that's not the case. It's a tense record. It's the first one they'd done where they let multiple songs stretch to great lengths. It broods like other Low songs brood, but it broods a lot. There are a few light moments, relatively speaking—"La La La Song," for instance—but for the most part Trust strikes me as a spacious and dark album.

I don't know the record that well yet, to be honest. I still feel like we're trying to reconnect with each other. We've both grown, we're different people. Did we have differences before? Was that why we lost touch? Or did I just move away? I have The Great Destroyer and Drums and Guns on my eventual to-buy list too. I've heard select tracks from each and had previously thought they were okay, or bad. But for some reason I feel I want to try again. Oh, also, the new album. C'mon. They just dropped a track from that record, "Try to Sleep," which is lovely.

Coincidentally I had my iTunes library on shuffle the other day and "Venus" came on, which was originally a 7" single from 1997 and is now found on the Lifetime of Temporary Relief set. I hadn't heard it in a long time but it's really just a great little pop song. Which got me thinking about all the other great little pop songs they've done. So perhaps in response to the edginess of Trust, or because of hearing "Venus," or due to my enjoyment of "Try to Sleep," or simply of the spirit of trying to reignite an old friendship, I made a playlist of a bunch of my favorite "poppy" Low songs.

February 01, 2011

Maybe I blame Feist. Her first album, 2004’s Let It Die, featured a couple of tracks that tested my tolerance levels: “One Evening” and “Leisure Suite” They were cheesy, quote-unquote sexy wink wink—“One Evening” especially. Feist even seemed to acknowledge this in her video for that song, in which she and her partner do a silly synchronized dance that underlines how dumb the whole thing is.

I recall an interview between Leslie Feist and Nic Harcourt on KCRW a few years ago in which she herself admitted that Let It Die was assembled piecemeal and was released with no expectation that it would catch on; had she been more premeditated about it, she said, she might not have put certain songs on it. I chose to assume she meant the songs I disliked. These were, after all, straight up soft rock songs. Maybe it sounds silly to say that about some Feist songs and not others—her music is, all around, pretty soft. But many of them are gentle without being corny, sexy without being “sexy,” heartwarming without being manipulative. These two songs, on the other hand, crossed over to something cheeky and ironic. Still, these were, to me, aberrations on an otherwise fantastic album.

Her next album, The Reminder, also possessed a few soft rockisms but more organically integrated. The irony was mostly absent but there was still a smoothness to it, in songs like “Brandy Alexander” and “Limit to Your Love.” I didn’t care. I liked it. Claims from other quarters were that Feist was part of a new wave in indie music that was… boring. Bland. I wrote a post at the time defending my enjoyment of the record, even if it was “Adult Alternative.” Defending my enjoyment against whom? Mostly me, if I'm being honest. Feist made me cognizant of an internal struggle over my own taste. I thought I detected a shift in my tastes toward something with less of an edge and I wasn’t really sure what that meant. The young punk in me was raging against the aging softy I was becoming. At any rate by the time Sky Blue Sky was the definition of "Dad Rock" and Fleet Foxes were winning hearts (and rousing consternation) with their latter-day CSNYisms, I was happily on board and I didn’t care who called it boring. So I'd gone soft.

*

Meanwhile something else was happening in indie rock that I wasn’t fully paying attention to. That winky nod to soft rock I’d detected in “One Evening” had become a thing. More specifically 80s soft rock, or more generally just shit music from the 80s. Critical consensus regarding Hall & Oates, they of the atrocious “Man-Eater” and “Kiss On My List,” was being reconsidered. So too was Phil Collins. I couldn’t take it seriously, and I still can’t. I’m convinced that every nod to the wonders of Hall & Oates includes a wink and sly smile—like, “They’re great (not really).”

Other than being occasionally mystified by this trend, I’d mostly steered clear of it until I saw the movie (500) Days of Summer, which I mostly liked except for the one scene that was soundtracked by Hall & Oates. Aside from a random dance sequence feeling out of place in the otherwise not-absurd film, it rubbed me the wrong way because I knew that I was part of this film’s target demographic. Maybe on the older end, sure. Here were two characters who hailed more or less from the same subcultural milieu as I did—they had jobs in the arts, they bonded over the Smiths, they sang Pixies songs at karaoke—and when Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character gets laid he bursts into… Hall & Oates. Fuck me. Whatever, it’s meant to be funny, that’s all.

*

Parallel to this was the emergence of “Yacht Rock,” a youtube phenomenon made by and for bearded hipsters. Clearly a joke, each of its dozen episodes found their punch lines in bad wigs and references to Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross, etc. It actually wasn’t that funny but a lot of people seemed to disagree based on how many times Yacht Rock showed up in my RSS feed. But whatever, it’s sketch comedy and who cares if I think it’s funny or not.

*

Then last year Grizzly Bear, a band who on record has zero sense of humor (intentionally, at least—often their songs remind me of the scary part of Splash Mountain), released a version of their song “While You Wait for the Others,” with the actual Michael McDonald on lead vocals. It was something of a bastard child of the genuine (not really) rehabilitation of Hall & Oates and Phil Collins and the obvious parody of Yacht Rock.

The thing that was weird about it was that the song was played totally straight. Like most Grizzly Bear songs it is dramatic and creepy and somewhat clinical. With McDonald on lead vocals, it was still all of those things. The punch line really came in the concept; the execution was straight, so you’d be forgiven if, midway into the track, you just sort of got into it the way you do with Grizzly Bear songs (assuming you like Grizzly Bear songs in the first place). Whatever. I just sort of took as an attempt at a joke by a band that had never made a joke before.

I was able to avoid all of these jokes because their whole basis for humor fell outside my sphere of interest. I was alive in the 80s and I remember these bands being massive hits. Barring a few exceptions (the Footloose soundtrack and Genesis’ Invisible Touch), I hated all these acts back then, so this whole “remember those shitty bands?” joke wasn’t that funny to me. Any joke that involves me remembering Bruce Hornsby or Christopher Cross or Air Supply is a joke I don’t need to hear. The punch line, fyi, is that it sucks.

Meanwhile I was perfectly happy listening to my bland, boring, no-edged indie bands like Midlake and Iron & Wine and Neko Case and Fleet Foxes. It’s not the softness that bothers me so much as the soft reference points.

Skip to 2010: Gayngs were joking too. They made an awful record which references white soul and R&B of the 80s. They wear matching white suits when they perform. They covered (and butchered) George Michael’s “One More Try.” When I went off on their album last year none other than Justin Vernon tweeted at me, informing me that the band in fact took their whole endeavor quite seriously. And, if you compare Gayngs' astute level of musicianship to, say, the half-assed nature of the Yacht Rock videos, he has a point. Though he also admitted it was supposed to be funny (as if it weren’t apparent). “So what?” he seemed to be asked me. (Maybe you're saying that too. Can't I take a joke?) I responded that if the band knows that, on some level, the songs are funny, then they must also grasp that they're funny for the same reason "Yacht Rock" is funny—the punchline is that it sucks.

I feel more or less the same way about Ariel Pink’s recent album, Before Today. Conceptually, the record seems to evolve over a kind of timeline, the early songs sounding like mid/late-60s garage and psychedelia, the middle songs veering toward 70s gaudiness, the end morphing into 80s cheese. Like the Gayngs record, I was attracted to Before Today because of one outstanding track which turned out, I realized later, to be an utterly faithful cover. (For Gayngs it was Godley & Creme’s “Cry”; for Ariel Pink it was "Bright Lit Blue Sky," by the Rockin’ Ramrods and later the Rising Storm.) Realizing both albums had just one gem, and that the gem required only some good ears and the musical talent to ape their source perfectly, only underlined how much I disliked the rest of their material—i.e., when they're not in tribute band mode, their ideas are bunk. I can grant that Ariel Pink is up to something more original, perhaps more ambitious (and has apparently been mining this territory for years), but it doesn’t make the music more listenable.

In college my friend Dan used to say “sweeeet” a lot. He sounded like a douche when he said it, but he knew he sounded like a douche. He was mocking douches who said “sweeeet” all the time. But he did it so much—he admitted this to me—that he had gotten to the point of legitimately saying “sweeeet” in response to something cool. It had stopped being a joke and instead just became part of his lexicon.

This to me is the feeling I get while listening to Destroyer’s new album, Kaputt. The album is rife with smooth saxophone. All the air quotes that might surround all the other songs I’ve talked about here have evaporated. The music of Destroyer sounds genuine, earnest. And—going back to the same internal battle I had over Feist—that disturbs me. To me it feels like a sea change has happened within indie rock in which the “sweeeet” joke has just become part of the lexicon. At one point, back when Feist was fumbling through her choreographed "One Evening" routine and later singing about her Brandy Alexander, I felt a tide turning against that younger me who stridently hated anything appoaching lite rock. I still like Feist, and still side with myself in that inner dialogue... but Kaputt, and in fact a whole trend in indie rock, has crossed a line.

I missed all the hullabaloo around James Blake last year. Now he's got his debut album hitting stores today. I've heard just two songs from this album, so I don't claim to have the last word on the dude. But God, those songs. One is called "The Wilhelm Scream," and is it just me or does it sound like Aaron Neville singing over the music for "In the Air Tonight"? The other song, no shit, is a Feist cover. Full circle!

*

There’s a line in one of the Destroyer songs where Dan Bejar sings “I sent a message to the press: it said ‘don’t be ashamed or disgusted with yourselves.’” I’ve seen the line quoted in a number of reviews of Kaputt, all of which cite how daring Bejar is to engage such a crap genre and how meta he is for acknowledging it. Oh, and by the way, as far as I can tell I am the only person on the internet who thinks Kaputt is an awful record. I’ve only seen raves, most of which are calling it not only good but the best album Bejar has ever made. Likewise Before Today was Pitchfork's top album of last year, Gayngs is not universally loathed or shrugged off, James Blake's debut is eagerly anticipated. I don't think I've ever felt more out of step with indie music. It disturbs me because, in the case of Bejar and Blake at least, the punch line is that there is no punch line. It's not a comedy anymore.

January 31, 2011

I'm trying something new with these My Listening Hours posts in 2011: rather than a week of posts every three months—far too daunting to compose anymore—I'll trot out a much more abbreviated monthly post. Ideally I'll have written at length about most of these records already. At the three month mark I may still do a quarterly report of some sort... who knows.

I've ordered these by when I acquired them. This "month" actually stretches back to about mid-December—everything I've acquired since doing my year-end wrap-up. Without further ado...

Third Eye Foundation: The Dark (2010)Singling out one track from this record does not do The Dark justice. It succeeds best as a whole work, listened to from beginning to end. Probably my favorite album of this month's bunch. Review.

Actress: Splazsh (2010)There's probably a name for whatever genre Actress is working in—microhouse? dubstep?—but I don't keep up well enough with all the varieties of electronica to know for sure. At any rate Splazsh is a mostly great album that rewards multiple listens. Review.

Kraftwerk: Autobahn (1974)Despite my love of all things krautrock, Kraftwerk has been a longtime blind spot for me. Last year I started at the very beginning, picking up their four earliest records, most of which were spacey and aimless and featuring more organic instrumentation and composition. This is my first real taste of the Kraftwerk everyone means when they talk about Kraftwerk. The title track is, as anyone would tell you, spectacular. The rest is merely okay by comparison (it is, after all, hard to compare). Funny to me, though, that this gets as much praise as it does when other groups were making music as good (or better) than this at the same time. Fr'instance, Harmonia.

Brian Eno: Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974)I've been slowly and steadily picking up various Brian Eno albums ever since finally getting around to Another Green World a couple of years go. I've begun with his early, pop-oriented albums, this being the last one I've come across. It's not as perfect as Here Come the Warm Jets, nor as bouncy as Before and After Science, nor as ambitious as Another Green World—but it's still pretty good. I'm eager to start moving into Eno's ambient albums. Suggestions on where exactly to start are welcome.

Disappears: Lux (2010)Tim Hecker: An Imaginary Country (2009)Belong: October Language (2004)As I perused Pitchfork's list of upcoming releases in 2011 (which I detailed here), one word kept jumping out at me: Kranky. Feeling a little drained on rock music, I felt a renewed attraction to the label that treated me to so many great albums years back when I did a better job of keeping up with ambient and space rock. All three of these acts have albums coming up any time now. Since I didn't know their stuff, I went back and sought out earlier releases from each. Well, turns out Disappears isn't space rock so much as a fairly noisy psychedelic act—which is fine! Actually I think Lux is a pretty good album—good enough for me to want to hear the next Disappears album. The Tim Hecker album, of these three, is the highlight. It's a really beautiful ambient album. I do have a couple of other tracks by him and I feel convinced now that I am a convert who will follow him for a long time. The Belong album is also quite nice—washes of distortion that feel more peaceful than noisy.

Destroyer: Kaputt (2011)I seem to be the only person on the internet who thinks this is a mostly terrible album. It has its redeeming qualities—the lyrics, for one—but I just can't stomach the soft rock genre Dan Bejar has chosen to take on. More about this record, and the soft rock trend, to come tomorrow. Anyway, here's one of the good songs.

The Radio Dept.: Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002–2010 (2011)There's still at least another disc's worth of miscellaneous Radio Dept. tracks that could be collected, and I'd happily pick that up too. Review.

Iron & Wine: Kiss Each Other Clean (2011)I made the mistake of playing my brilliant wife this album's worst track, "Big Burned Hand," before she heard anything else. Now Kiss Each Other Clean is dead to her. I would entreat her to give it another chance were it not for my own mixed feelings. There are some great songs here, such as "Godless Brother in Love," but it's also accurate to say this is Iron & Wine's worst album. I'll have a fuller review in a few days.